HCR Corporation

Human Computing Resources was founded in 1976 by several computer scientists at, and graduates of, the University of Toronto, with the aim of creating computer graphics and systems software. Baecker served as president of the new firm. at the University of Toronto during the mid-1970s was one of the early pioneers of Unix adoption in Canada. a student of Baecker's who had developed the interactive NewsWhole pagination system for The Globe and Mail, which became an early predecessor to desktop publishing. Other Baecker students who later became well known in the Unix world included Rob Pike and Tom Duff, although neither worked at HCR. ==Formative years==

Consulting and contracting The new company's offices were on St. Mary Street, Human Computing Resources initially focused on information technology consulting and contract programming jobs. Despite newspapers seeing demonstrations of the product and liking it, they were unwilling to commit their businesses to a product from an unproven, very small software business. In 1979 the NewsWhole product was dropped. By 1979 the new firm had begun exhibiting at the annual Canadian Computer Show and Conference in Toronto. Baecker maintained a part-time involvement in his academic career during this period. Unix specialists Human Computing Resources began to focus on writing software for the Unix operating system, which was starting to gain a foothold outside its Bell Labs founding place. This work began in 1979 when HCR acquired a license to resell Unix from Western Electric Co. Microsoft was working on its version of Unix, called Xenix, and in 1982 engaged with the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in this work, with the two companies' engineers working together on improvements. In doing so, Microsoft gave HCR and Logica the rights to do Xenix ports and license Xenix binaries in those territories. As a result, some of Xenix was developed by Human Computing Resources in Toronto. The early history of Xenix has a sometimes unclear narrative, but by some accounts HCR had a greater role than just extending what Microsoft had done, as it had to take over the initial porting of the AT&T Version 7 Unix after Microsoft was unable to do so. In particular, as Baecker said in 2001 for a University of Toronto course he gave on software as a business, HCR's focus became doing "UNIX operating systems programming for hardware companies without UNIX expertise needing to bring UNIX to market quickly." As such, their customer space was in the original-equipment manufacturer (OEM) and value-added reseller (VAR) markets, including Control Data Corporation, NCR, Prime Computer, and National Semiconductor. Other architectures they worked on included the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 and VAX-11, Motorola 68000, Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000, PERQ workstation, and Computer Automation 4/95. It also stressed the portability traits, good and bad, of the C language. had had an especially historic role in Unix, having done, in 1977, one the first ports of Unix to a non-PDP architecture while he was at the University of Wollongong in Australia. In 1983, the trade magazine InfoWorld stated that HCR "probably has more experience porting UNIX to different architectures than anyone else." The HCR variant of Unix was branded as Unity. Other products Besides Unix itself, the company was showcasing a variety of system software products. These included a compiler for the Pascal programming language and an interpreter for the BASIC programming language. Cross compilers from VAX Unix to the NS16032 architecture for C, Pascal, and Fortran 77 were also offered. There was a Unix-based RT-11 emulator. For operating system usability, there was the configurable HCR Menu Shell, which ran atop the standard Bourne shell and provided a more friendly and customizable interface, and the HCR/EDIT screen-oriented text editor. which was supported commercially by Rhodnius Ltd, another Toronto-based software firm. Financials By one account, HCR received funding in 1982 and 1983 from two Canadian venture capital firms, Ventures West Technologies and TD Capital Group, with the two combined ending up with 50 percent ownership of HCR; more money was subsequently raised by diluting existing shares. and offered introductory Unix seminars at various North American cities. Between 1982 and 1985, HCR staff published a dozen articles for, or presented at conferences of, the USENIX association, and HCR hosted the Summer 1983 USENIX conference in Toronto where some 1,600 Unix users were in attendance. Overall, however, HCR did not focus on one specific mission. In his 2001 course on software as a business, Baecker spoke of the "Three Product Strategies of HCR", and began by being critical of the time he was in charge of the company, saying that its strategy reflected his personality: "the academic, the visionary, ... go everywhere, which is to have no focus and to go nowhere". ==Change in leadership==

In February 1984, Baecker stepped down as president of HCR, He was replaced as president by Dennis Kukulsky, formerly a national sales manager with Tektronix. Baecker remained as chairman of the company. Under Kukulsky, the company sought to focus on software products that would run on Unix, It included the business application modules of Chronicle but more importantly contained a 4GL-like application generator to allow HCR's customers to create new business applications or tailor existing ones. Chariot was well received in computer industry trade shows, and some 1,500 VARs signed up for it or otherwise indicated interest. But HCR was short on both time and money and the promised delivery date of February 1986 was not met, and even had Chariot been ready for release, the company lacked the ability to market it effectively. These business products were not successful, with very little actual revenue coming in from them and substantial development costs being incurred. Overall, Human Computing Resources went through the same tribulations as many software firms, such as a failing to accurately predict development costs and being unsure how to market products once developed. One executive commented to the Financial Post that when it came to software, "Pricing is a black art." Baecker's course analysis spoke critically of this era of the company as well, saying that it had embodied Kukulsky's personality of "the salesman, the opportunist ... go where the money is, i.e., 4GLs for UNIX, an area in which HCR had no expertise". ==Change of name and another change in leadership==

The fallout from the Chariot project was such that by July 1986, Kukulsky had resigned and co-founder Tilson was president of the company. Tilson had previously been serving as vice president of technical development. The company's management divested itself of the business products, By 1987, the official name of the company had changed to HCR Corporation. In 1989 the Canadian branch of UniForum named Tilson the Man of the Decade for his work on Unix. Similarly, HCR had a contract with Intel to develop C and Fortran 77 compilers for the iWarp parallel computing supercomputer architecture. The company's management made one of its focuses be on development tools. By 1989 HCR was still a vendor for a BASIC interpreter and Pascal compiler, Their advertisements for the HCR/C++ product emphasized the multiple platform packaging, documentation, and support services that came with it. HCR was an early participant in the ISO C++ standardization effort. HCR also provided validation services and a test suite for C compilers. In addition, HCR developed and sold the Configuration Control Menu System, or CoCo. A survey article in Software Engineering Notes pronounced CoCo an "interesting tool" that could be used in conjunction with existing Unix-based configuration management commands such as SCCS. By 1990, HCR had around 50 employees. ==Acquisition by SCO==

The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), an American company based in Santa Cruz, California, announced on 9 May 1990 that it was acquiring HCR Corporation. Financial terms were not disclosed but the companies said it would be a "share swap with a multimillion dollar value." The acquired entity would take on the name SCO Canada, Inc., and operate as an independent subsidiary company. The office remained at the same Bloor Street address. Tilson remained head of the operation and became a vice president of SCO. The two companies had been both allies and competitors at different times in the past, SCO Canada also took over work on the existing SCO Microsoft C compiler that dated back to Xenix days; it was offered in addition to the pcc compiler as part of the SCO OpenDesktop Development System. SCO Canada continued to sell the HCR C++ product, which by 1991 had an estimated 450 licensed sites using it, and maintained a role in the language's standardization effort. SCO Canada also took on some other work, such as looking to provide strategic partners with porting assistance to SCO Unix, and doing integration work between SCO Unix and Novell NetWare. In September 1995, it was announced that SCO was buying the UnixWare and related Unix business from Novell, which in turn had acquired it from Unix Systems Laboratories in 1993. The New Jersey office of Novell had a languages and development tools group with more advanced technology than what SCO Canada had been working with, and that made the SCO Canada engineering staff largely redundant once the Novell deal was closed in December 1995. The SCO Canada office was shut down in early 1996. ==References==