This entry was originally prompted by an email I received from Diago Fontolan in Italy. He'd picked up a few of this Italian company's products on eBay. Despite having an office in the UK Praim thin clients very rarely appear on eBay.co.uk.
Praim was founded in Trento, Italy in 1987. As well as the main HQ in Trento it also has a London Office.
Unfortunately this company is very much focussed in the present. I could not find anything on their website about legacy products. The support pages are password protected and you have to register first in order to gain access. I did not try registering.
Google was not a great deal of help either, but I did do better recently (2021) - see below. Back in 2012 I found an AMD press release from February 2001 which covered the release of the Geode-based Primo series. I also located this (undated) brochure summarising the Primo range.
In his email Diego mentioned::
Praim model PRIMO HW01, has the same hardware as the Igel-W (also labelled WinNET III). It has Windows CE 4 as OS.
The PRAIM HW04 Thin Client is hardware equivalent to BCOM WinNet D550A (a 533 MHz CPU VIA Eden Platform).
Google found me a pdf that gave a list of out-of-production products that gave various "end-of-...." dates. Unfortunately I couldn't download it but Google could give me a "Quick View" of the document. A link to the images of the two page document from 2012 are below. Since then I have found two further updates of this document:
In March 2021 I came across a distributor that had ceased trading in 2015. According to Companies House the company is still registered with them but 'dormant'. The domain name was still active and had been renewed for a further year in 2020. What I found strange was that the website hadn't been taken down or updated and was frozen in time at the point I assume they ceased trading in early 2015. (The displayed copyright has been updated to 2021 so they haven't forgotten it is there). Anyway it provided a nice snapshot of Praim's product range in 2015. Just in case the site gets taken down you'll find my abstract of that information here.
I also came across a PowerPoint presentation from 2015 with further information on the product range. That you will find in a pdf here.
In August 2018 I got hold of a couple of examples of their Compact Dual Core series.
In March 2021 I heard from Davide who had an example of the Ultra series.
