The Massachusetts Computer Corporation (MASSCOMP) was a
computer manufacturer based in
Westford, Massachusetts
Westford is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was at 24,643 at the time of the 2020 Census.
History
Westford began as 'West Chelmsford', a village in the town of Chelmsford. The village of West Chelmsfor ...
. Originally conceived by C. Forbes Dewey of
MIT and inventor Chester Schuler, it was founded formally in 1981. Its target market was
real-time computing
Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constra ...
, with a focus on high-speed data acquisition. Its major innovation was that it created the first widely available computer product which was able to
sample analog signals at one million samples per second and store the resulting data to disk continuously. Given the technology available at the time—
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sect ...
series
CPUs of only a few
megahertz in speed and slow disk drives—this product represented quite a technological achievement.
The MASSCOMP MC-500 is a 68000-based microcomputer running a
real-time variant of the
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
operating system.
For a small company, MASSCOMP incorporated a number of ambitious and innovative projects in addition to Real-Time Unix, including their own
C and
Fortran compiler, a block diagram language known as "Laboratory Workbench" that allowed visual programming of real time systems to connect real-time analog inputs and outputs to signal processing operations and interactive virtual instruments for data display, and their own high level graphics subsystem.
MASSCOMP grew to about $65 million in sales per year and ultimately purchased