Computervision and Prime

Dave Delay has a good post on his days at Computervision. If you’re relatively new to technology or Boston you may never have heard of the company. It was a major player back in the 1980s.

My first job out of graduate school was working for Applicon, a Computervision competitor. I worked for a couple of CAD/CAE startups after Applicon and then decided that I neeeded a saner life with a slower pace. I joined Prime Computer to work on their solid modeling product called PrimeDesign.

The pace may have been a little slower at Prime but there was no lack of drama. One week after I started, Prime made a hostile takeover bid to buy Computervision. When the deal was completed, Prime replaced Computervision’s management team with its own and merged the two development organizations. The merger was handled badly. There was a lot of anamosity on both sides.

From the perspective of a Computervision employee, Prime was an aging minicomputer vendor. What could it offer? But Computervision wasn’t in such great shape either. The company had a lot of customers but also had a large aging, unweildy code base. And its market share was being eroded by PC CAD vendors at the low-end and more aggressive companies such as Parametric Technology at the high-end.

To further complicate matters, Prime bought CALMA, another CAD vendor, from GE. Needless to say, merging three development organizations was harder still, especially when one is located in San Diego, quite distant from the other two.

To add insult to injury, Prime had spent a lot of its cash when it bought Computervision. This made it an acqusition target. A lot of Prime’s remaining cash and management attention was spent defending the company from a hostile takeover bid by MAI Basic Four. This was followed by a leveraged buyout by J H Whitney and more management turmoil. Around that point I left Prime. In the time since then, the Prime portion of the company (and the Prime name) was jettisoned, retaining Computervision which was eventually sold to Parametric Technology.