Primary radar can be used to compute distance as it would be proportional to the transit time taken by a pulse of energy to travel to the object and back again. As they have azimuth, they may be also have SOME elevation resolution.
It is not easy to measure altitude of plane by radar. If I remember times of my military service, the main lobe of parabolic antenna is not narrow enough to measure altitude with good accuracy. To increase accuracy, vertical orange peel antenna was used, but I can remember that a precision was not usually better then +/- 3000 ft. Sometime worse, it depends on distance between plane and radar, clouds, surface objects, size of plane etc.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...a/Mps-16-1.jpg
To track position of plane like T7 at FL 300+ and distance about 200nm was very easy. Blips were clear and you could see them in a second on the screen.