MASSCOMP (original) (raw)

The Massachusetts Computer Corporation (MASSCOMP) was a computer manufacturer based in Westford, Massachusetts. 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, 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 series CPUs of only a few megahertz in speed and slow disk drives—this product represented quite a technological achievement.