24 Jul
2014
24 Jul
'14
8:10 a.m.
On Jul 24, 2014, at 4:18 AM, Philip Belben <philip at axeside.co.uk> wrote:
The only thing I remember about Perkin-Elmer was that they bought
Applied Biosystems, which made a number of pieces of equipment in
my father's Biopolymers lab in the '80s and '90s. Most of those
were controlled by micros of some sort, usually Macs in the case
of Hopkins.
- Dave
There were
lots of minicomputer makers. For example, I've seen no
discussion on Varian minis and darned little on TI 990s or CDC 1700s, as
a start.
A name that I remember from advertisements in the 1980s (I don't think I ever
encountered a machine) was Perkin Elmer, who made 32-bit minis. Does anyone recall them?
The Wikipedia article concentrates on the much more recent history of the corporation, but
it does seem that, like HP, their computers were a spinoff of their scientific
instruments.