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Prime

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Prime Systems and the ICF

An Overview of Prime's system developments is:

1972: Prime 200: The first Prime system, similar to the DDP 516 but a 32-bit machine with paging
1973: Prime 100 and Prime 300: The Prime 100 was a stripped down version of the Prime 200 (no memory parity or floating point). The Prime 300 was the current system at the time ICF was being launched.
1976: Prime 400: By 1977, the Prime 300 was being replaced by the Prime 400. The Prime 300 was withdrawn in 1979. The ICF Prime 400 arrived in December 1977.
1979: Prime 450, 550, 650 ,750: The Prime 550 was an upgrade in performance over the Prime 400 while the Prime 750 was a major upgrade which was very competitive with a similarly priced DEC VAX System. PRIMENET and the local area network software RINGNET were announced. Four Prime 550 systems were installed in 1979 and 1980. Prime 750 systems were installed at RAL and UMIST.
1980: Prime 150 and 250
1981: Prime 850: Prime also marketed MEDUSA CAD Software
1982: Prime 2250
1984: Prime 2550, 9650, 9750
1985: Prime 9955, 9655, 2655: A Prime 9955 was installed at UMIST and a Prime 9655 at Nottingham in 1985
1986: Prime 2350, 2450, 9755, and 9955-II
1987: Prime 2455, 2755, 6350, and 6550

A summary of the Prime systems installed by ICF is:

Location	Initial Machine		Intermediate Machine(s)	Final Machine
Location	Date	Type	Intermediate Machine(s)	Date	Type
RAL (Services)	1977	P400	2 × P400; 2 × P750	1986	P9955
RAL (Dev)	1977	P300	P400; P550/1	1986	P9655
Sussex	1979	P550/1	-	-	-
City	1980	P550/1	-	1986	P750
Surrey	1980	P550/1	-	1986	P550/2
UCL	1980	P550/1	-	1986	P750
UMIST	1980	P750	P9950	1985	P9955/1
Warwick	1980	P550/1	P550/2	1986	P750
East Anglia	1979	P400	-	1986	P750
Nottingham	1977	P400	-	1985	P9655

The original Prime 400 ran at 0.5 MIPS, had a main store of 192 Kbytes and 160 Mbytes of disc storage. Typical configurations for the main systems used by ICF were: