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When SCO is dead and buried
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Comments (3)
I was a student at UC Santa Cruz in the mid- to late 1980s, and I got my first Unix account on a time-share system. I remember wondering how I could get that kind of environment on a PC. At that time, PCs were extremely expensive, and Macs were just coming in to the campus.
A very different kind of student used the Unix systems, a number of which could be accessed from terminals all around the campus in rooms that also included line printers. You could also print on a laser printer -- and this was before the Apple LaserWriter appeared, at least on campus -- at the computer center, with your printout stuffed in a cubbyhole awaiting pickup.
Many just used the Mac lab. You had to bring your own floppy disc and suffer through printouts on the ImageWriter.
And then there was SCO -- the Santa Cruz Operation -- bringing Unix to the unwashed IBM-PC masses (if you had a few thousand bucks to spare, I imagine). I never used SCO Unix and never knew anybody who worked there, but the idea that you could run Unix on a PC was huge for me. I remember them having some cool ads back in the day.
Then the '90s arrived, along with Linux and BSD. In 2007, I finally got around to trying Linux (Knoppix and Ubuntu at first, then Puppy, DSL, Debian, Slackware ... then OpenBSD and now back to Ubuntu and Debian).
I know almost nothing of the history of SCO, but the company seemed to show such promise in the '80s.
The whole episode over the past 20 years (i.e. the lawsuits) just shows me how great open-source is, both from a freedom perspective and a technical perspective as well ...
A very different kind of student used the Unix systems, a number of which could be accessed from terminals all around the campus in rooms that also included line printers. You could also print on a laser printer -- and this was before the Apple LaserWriter appeared, at least on campus -- at the computer center, with your printout stuffed in a cubbyhole awaiting pickup.
Many just used the Mac lab. You had to bring your own floppy disc and suffer through printouts on the ImageWriter.
And then there was SCO -- the Santa Cruz Operation -- bringing Unix to the unwashed IBM-PC masses (if you had a few thousand bucks to spare, I imagine). I never used SCO Unix and never knew anybody who worked there, but the idea that you could run Unix on a PC was huge for me. I remember them having some cool ads back in the day.
Then the '90s arrived, along with Linux and BSD. In 2007, I finally got around to trying Linux (Knoppix and Ubuntu at first, then Puppy, DSL, Debian, Slackware ... then OpenBSD and now back to Ubuntu and Debian).
I know almost nothing of the history of SCO, but the company seemed to show such promise in the '80s.
The whole episode over the past 20 years (i.e. the lawsuits) just shows me how great open-source is, both from a freedom perspective and a technical perspective as well ...
The company was named in order to deceive. When a SCO sales droid would call Company X, he'd say, "Hi, this is Guy Smith from the Santa Cruz Operation...." The bean-counter at Company X would be left thinking, "I didn't know we had an office in Santa Cruz," but rather than stir anything up, he'd let the SCO sales droid keep talking.
Today, we'd call that "social engineering," and tag it "evil."
Today, we'd call that "social engineering," and tag it "evil."
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Yes, SCO had good products once. Caldera had a fantastic distro in OpenLinux. Now it's all dead and gone. The greed of management outweighed all.