Stefan,
I was never involved in CAD, so I don't know their products very well,
especially the terminals. The following answers are from vague memory,
and digging through various things I have around, plus some creative use
of google.
what was the maker of the work stations (or who could
they be) ?
Prime resold several models of Tektronix stations. I've seen references
to models PGT4109, PGT4111 and PGT4125 which were presumably based on
the Tektronix 4000 series terminals with those numbers.
They also had a line of workstations with model numbers like PW150,
PW153 and PW200. I don't know anything about these.
There were workstations based on Lundy and Megatek graphics terminals,
that connected to the Prime host using a high speed controller called
the MPC. I don't know what model numbers were assigned to these.
Prime designed and manufactured several models of serial terminals.
Most of these also had optional expansions to become full-blown x86 PCs.
It's possible variants of the latter were sold as cad workstations.
could someone name a number of pcb design programs for
PrimOS ?
The Prime electronic design product was THEDA. They had a simulator
too, THEMIS. There was something called EDMS.
MEDUSA was 2d physical cad. Ford wrote PDGS for auto body design, and
ran it on Prime systems. There was a product called GNC, Graphical
Numerical Control, for CAM. They bought a plant design tool called
PDMS.
Being near the US Big 3 auto manufacturers, we heard more about MEDUSA
and some of the other physical cad products than we did electronics
stuff, through interaction with our Prime service guys, attendance at
user group meetings, etc. Ford ran networks of 2250 systems which
supported two engineers each, and were interconnected in ring topologies
using Primenet over twinaxial cable. A large host system on the ring
provided storage and management. They also had one or more large 3d
"plotters" that would sculpt large blocks of clay, used to make models
of car designs for, one guesses, wind tunnel experiments and the like.
De