[ale] (OT) Fate of SCO

[Chris Fowler]

On Fri, 2011-04-08 at 11:00 -0400, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Really sad.  
> 
> In its day I made my living on SCO UNIX and rather liked it.   I
> disagree with the comment about it only being used for cash registers.
> We had over 2000 sites that were running it as their central systems.
> One thing I liked about SCO then was that they were hardware agnostic
> (other than requiring x86 based stuff).   Most other UNIX flavors at the
> time required you to run on their hardware.

Ditto here.  I primarily supported SCO on Compaq equipment.   I learned
SCO via immersion.   Every one else ran DOS or Windows but I ran SCO OS5
on my desktop.  This made communication difficult since back then there
was no OO or Office for SCO.  Even mail programs were not very good.  I
used telnet and remote X to run many Linux programs on my SCO desktop.  

I also supported a lot of AIX but was not lucky enough to have my own
PowerPC desktop.

We also supported a lot of Xenix which I believe then was referred to as
"Poor Man's UNIX".

The benefit to the SCO offerings where, just as Jeff said, no
proprietary hardware.  I would say however that you did have to follow
their supported hardware booklet.  Most Compaq platforms were supported.

I still remember being giddy when I installed my first SCO system from
CD!!  No 1/4" tapes, no floppies.  If anyone is interested I may still
have tapes in my attic.  Maybe even disks.  I may even have some
licenses.

The one thing I did learn from SCO was that the commercial UNIX world
then was different than Linux.  Many of the packages we use in Linux and
consider "standard" were optional and required licenses in SCO.  This
included a development environment and even TCP/IP!!!!!  I also have a
few Skunkware CDs in my attic.  

I bought my first SUN license via their educational discount.  Still
cost me $100.

I had a mini HP network in my house.  Ran a G30 as a server and had 4
7XX workstations in a spare room.  Each had nice 21" tube monitors.  All
running HP-UX 10.XX  I have some of that software in my attic too.


Chris