British Technology Group established a company, Compeda Ltd, to exploit software developed and owned by the government; they took over the marketing and user support of PDMS, while the software continued to be developed by the CADCentre, with funding from Compeda.
1982 Compeda was the largest UK-owned firm in the fast expanding market of computer science.[1]
1982 When the UK government decided to privatise (sell) anything that did not need to be government-owned, Compeda Ltd was sold to Prime Computer Inc. for a net negative sum of money (the government having prevented a sale to Computervision, said to have been at a higher price[2]). Prime Computer decided that PDMS had no commercial value or future and returned the marketing rights for the product to CADCentre.[3]
CADCentre was later privatised
2001 CADCentre changed its name to AVEVA.