Aims The goal of SCO Forum was to spread the company's message and inform its users and partners as to the capabilities and technical characteristics of its products and express optimism about the future path of the company. As ''
Dr. Dobb's Journal'' later wrote, "SCO Forum was the place to be if you were a Unixhead." With SCO having built a successful business with its Unix-on-commodity-hardware offering, Forum was used by the company to argue why new competitors in the space, such as
Univel and
SunSoft, would not be successful. In later years, when Unix itself came under threat, first from
Microsoft's
Windows NT and then from open source
Linux, it was a role of Forum to stress that Unix was not going away and that business success could still be had with it. New deals between SCO and other companies in the industry were often announced at Forum. the strategic importance of which was given much attention at the time. On the other hand, failed initiatives announced at previous events, such as SCO's involvement in the
Advanced Computing Environment (ACE), were explained away as quickly as possible. SCO was looking for a place to hold an event that would bring together developers to exchange ideas, and the university said that it could provide such a spot in late August, before students returned to campus for the fall quarter. The conference featured an announcement from SCO partner
AT&T about a merged Unix and
Xenix OS product. SCO Forum '89 was also reported on in
InfoWorld as well as in
PC Week. It featured third-party vendors announcing new releases of their products. In particular, an agreement with Microsoft to support
Word and related products on SCO systems was highlighted. Speakers at Forum '89 included
Paul Maritz of Microsoft and
Ray Noorda of Novell as well as the company's two founders,
Larry Michels and
Doug Michels. Advertisements for Forum stressed the value attending it would hold for a wide range of industry people – executives, managers, hardware developers, software developers, resellers, distributors, dealers, third-party vendors, and end users, as well as journalists and industry analysts, with session tracks available for each of these audiences. With the company showing some profitable quarters, anticipating going public, and holding a roughly 75 percent share in the
small-to-medium-sized businesses market, SCO Forum92 saw people in attendance, a big jump of about twice the previous year's total. From a third to a half of the attendees were from overseas, reflecting the company's worldwide success. performing an evening concert on the patio of
Cowell College at SCO Forum98, with
Monterey Bay in the background By 1994, Forum was on
UNIX Reviews recommended list of shows and conferences for readers to attend, and in a survey of events they characterized it as one of "the industry's leading-edge trade shows". An increase in technically-oriented, future-focused content was noted for Forum94. Forum94 had one of the more celebrated demonstrations, that of SCO's back-end role in the creation of
PizzaNet, which enabled computer users for the first time to order
pizza delivery from their local
Pizza Hut restaurant via the Internet. SCO had been an original co-sponsor of the
UniForum association of Unix users and had long had a close relationship with it. And by Forum98 there was an explicit UniForum track of breakout sessions available. Peak Forum attendance was in 1997 and 1998, when about people attended each event. Some 60 different countries were represented. After first getting together at a "birds of a feather" session at Forum in 1989, they formed an association known as APC Open in 1990, that was renamed to APC International in 1998 and iXorg in 2000. Another such attendee was Dupaco, the founder of which attended every Forum from the beginning and built a multi-million dollar business with SCO Xenix and later products while becoming the sole distributor of SCO products in the Netherlands. Many writers considered SCO Forum to be unique in the industry. An industry observer for
eWeek recalled that both Forum and the company Santa Cruz Operation itself had "reflected the ethos of the community for which it was named" and that "based in the college/beach town of Santa Cruz, Calif., epitomized an industry culture [soon to be] gone." And as one
ZDNet writer stated, "SCO Forum ... is like no conference or industry confab you'll ever attend. Part pep rally, part study session, part sales pitch, and part schmoozefest, Forum has a far different atmosphere than any conventional trade show."
Structure The conference was sometimes arranged through the
Jack Baskin School of Engineering of UC Santa Cruz and typically used classrooms, dining facilities, recreational areas, parking lots, and campus housing, most often at
Cowell College and
Stevenson College. Keynote addresses were held each morning in the university quarry, an open-air amphitheater nestled within
coastal redwoods. Due to the sharp diurnal temperature fluctuations characteristic of the
Santa Cruz Mountains, the quarry was often fog-enshrouded and chilly in the morning, but attendees were advised to dress in layers that could be shed later as the fog burned off and the sun shone over Monterey Bay. The quarry had plain wood bleachers for which cushions were provided to sit on. (For Forum 1999 only, which had a decline in attendance from the peak, It was cold and foggy there in the morning too, but as
CNN reported, that "couldn't dampen the spirits of Unix enthusiasts" in attendance. Even business rivals were sometimes represented, with
Sun Microsystems CEO
Scott McNealy – who was also in the Unix-on-Intel space – speaking at Forum in 1996. McNealy pointed out some areas of common interest in the process of giving what
ZDNet recalled several years later as "an extremely entertaining speech". In addition, guest speakers often included humorists of one kind or another, including such figures as
Dilbert cartoonist
Scott Adams, who one reporter said "enthralled" the crowd. Another such speaker was author
Dave Barry. In the evenings after dinner, "birds of a feather" sessions were held in a number of classrooms and other locations, Some attendees were put up in campus rooms and apartments, Side activities at Forum often included a golf tournament, a soccer tournament with international teams, a fun run, beach volleyball, wine tastings in the nearby mountains, and rides on the
Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railway or
Roaring Camp & Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad to a barbecue and the spectacular
Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. ==Caldera interlude==