[ale] Do not fight the Nazgul

[Lightner, Jeff]

We actually had one of our customers (a chain of 20+ hotels) running 286 machines with an early (1.x) SCO Xenix.    Those were my least favorite calls to deal with because that early version of Xenix didn’t have many of the tools UNIX of the same era.     I never worked on it but there was apparently a MS Xenix at one point.

You didn’t need Google back then because you actually got manuals with most products.   SCO’s UNIX manuals were fairly well done including the indexes.   We also used Informix and while it had very detailed manuals the indexes in them weren’t very good at all.    (Ironic that a DBMS manual had poor “indexes”.)  To learn how to create an “outer join” in Informix I had to essentially skim the entire manual to learn that was what it was called – I’d previously simply done it by putting checkmarks on the screen in an earlier DOS install of Paradox.


From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Scott Plante
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2016 11:20 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Do not fight the Nazgul

We used to take 386s and load SCO Xenix on them, with an 8 port serial card with Link dumb terminals attached. And our customers would pound away on the app we wrote with Progress database/4GL all day and it kept up pretty well. It's hard to remember how we ever got any of that stuff to work without being able to Google up answers on the Internet--oh yeah, those multi-hour calls with hardware tech support. Good times!
________________________________
From: "Jeff Lightner" <JLightner at dsservices.com<mailto:JLightner at dsservices.com>>
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org<mailto:ale at ale.org>>
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2016 9:32:04 AM
Subject: Re: [ale] Do not fight the Nazgul

Me too - I liked Caldera because it had licensed Wabi from Sun so I could run my company's required Windows based tools under my Linux workstation.

I made my living on SCO Unix for a while before that and really liked it.   They took what as good about SVR4 and augmented their original SVR3.2 stuff with it without taking a lot of the crap I didn't like about SVR4 in AT&T/NCR Unix SVR4.    For a long time SCO was the UNIX of choice for x86 systems.     One benefit to it was they did a lot of work with various hardware vendors to insure SCO would run on their systems unlike many other variants that were made by the hardware vendors and required their hardware.



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