Recalling the Golden Age of SCO.
We have all no doubt heard by now of SCO Group Inc. filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This news made me think back to what might be considered the “Golden Age” of SCO. Now, I’m talking of the company formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation, not today’s SCO Group. Nevertheless, much of the same software is involved, and that is where my focus will be.
Around 1991 or so, I was at a company that had started using SCO Open Desktop. I have to admit, it was actually quite a pleasure to use. Although I had used Sun workstations for quite a while, seeing that sort of quality begin to appear on x86 PCs was really something.
We have to keep in mind the state of PC-based UNIX systems in those days. Linux was still in its infancy at that point. It wasn’t until some time later that it would be suitable for enterprise-grade usage. There was MINIX, but it was clearly not a suitable OS for business use, for a variety of reasons. One of the other options was Coherent, although the companies I worked for never really used it.
Several years later, in about 1996 or so, I again was working for another company that used SCO products. This time, however, we were using UnixWare. Again, I have to say that it was quite a good system at the time. From what I recall of it, it was well-integrated, and offered fairly good hardware support. Even into the early 2000s, when hardware drivers were still offered on bundled 3.5″ floppy disks, it was quite common to find UnixWare drivers.
But by 1996, Linux had really started to gain momentum. In the BSD world, FreeBSD was really starting to become a contender. As those systems, along with others like BSD/OS and NetBSD, really started to mature, the need for systems like SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare apparently diminished quite a bit. In the years since then, I’ve rarely seen such systems in use.