Growth years with Xenix on Intel In early 1984, Microsoft and SCO issued a joint announcement about SCO's rights to distribute Xenix within the United States. SCO Xenix for the PC XT shipped sometime in 1984 and contains some enhancements from
4.2BSD Unix,
Micnet local area networking, and multiuser support. The product can support ten remote users via serial ports and was sold with optional packages for software development in C or
assembly language and for text processing. There had been considerable skepticism in the industry that Unix could ever establish a successful market position on the PC. In December 1986, SCO acquired the Software Products Group division of Logica. It became a wholly owned subsidiary, the Santa Cruz Operation Limited, and the basis for SCO's UK operation, and then to
Watford outside London. By 1993, almost half of SCO's revenues came from outside North America, and of that, almost half came from the United Kingdom. By early 1987, SCO had relocated its offices to a building at 400 Encinal Street in an industrial park in the Harvey West area of Santa Cruz (the building had been previously occupied by Intel). The company subsequently established offices in several other buildings in the Harvey West area. By early 1989, SCO had sold some 350,000 copies of Xenix in total, mostly through its channel. It later became clear that by the mid-1980s, Microsoft was losing interest in Xenix from their own business perspective, The terms of the agreement, which were not publicly disclosed, The deal put a Microsoft executive on SCO's board of directors; Already on the board since 1987 was another Microsoft veteran, Jim Harris, {{Quote box|quote=We had a very long relationship with Microsoft. We were partners, we were competitors, they invested in us, at one point they owned [around 20 percent] of the company, we licensed technology from them, we had lawsuits with them, we had every type of relationship with Microsoft you can imagine.|source=—Doug Michels, 2012. In any case, intellectual property rights were not transferred in the 1989 agreement and SCO would continue to pay Microsoft royalties for Xenix and Unix technologies. And that only came after SCO filed a complaint against Microsoft for violating
European Union competition law, a complaint that was ruled valid by the
European Commission.
SCO UNIX and Open Desktop Needing to create a product from a more recent branch from the Unix family tree,
Unix System V Release 3, SCO, together with Microsoft and
Interactive Systems Corporation, worked during 1987 and 1988 to develop the
System V/386 Release 3.2 version, which adds the ability to run existing Xenix binary applications on System V without requiring recompilation. The AT&T release of System V/386 Release 3.2 was announced at
SCO Forum in 1988, but further work was needed by SCO to incorporate Xenix device drivers before SCO could release it as a product.
SCO UNIX, full name SCO UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2.0, had first customer ship in June 1989; this became the basis for commercial successor to SCO Xenix. Based on an agreement forged with AT&T the previous year, it was also the first SCO operating system to carry the 'Unix' word itself in the product name. and Open Desktop became the first graphical Unix for an Intel 32-bit processor that was packaged in shrink-wrapped form. The TCP/IP networking stack and NFS implementation come from
Lachman Associates, while
Open Systems Interconnection software comes from
Retix, Inc. The relational database manager included is
Ingres. The Merge functionality comes from
Locus Computing Corporation. Version 3.2.2 of SCO Unix and Open Desktop came out in mid-1990; it contains various fixes and improvements for problems found in the field. However, Open Desktop did not make inroads on the personal computer market, as SCO Unix's system resource requirements were strenuous and there were few commonly used PC applications available for it. Beginning in the late 1980s, AT&T and
Sun Microsystems worked on a merge of Xenix,
BSD,
SunOS, and System V Release 3 features, with the result being known as
UNIX System V Release 4. SCO acquired the Toronto, Canada-based
HCR Corporation in 1990. Since their interactions in the early Xenix days, HCR had become Canada's leading commercial Unix platform developer. The HCR acquisition allowed SCO to improve its development tools offerings, especially for Open Desktop. SCO Canada took over work on the Microsoft C compiler that dates back to Xenix days but can produce binaries for either Xenix or Unix. In addition, the SCO Open Desktop Development System also offers the AT&T
pcc compiler, here called rcc, but it can only compile for Unix. SCO Canada continued to sell HCR's
Cfront-based C++ product, which by 1991 had an estimated 450 licensed sites using it. The Toronto site also took on some porting and integration work. SCO had a large technical publications operation at this time, with substantial staffing in each of the Santa Cruz, Toronto, and Watford offices, who as a group published on the order of 30,000 pages of documentation on a 18-month release cycle. One of the tech writers at Watford from 1991 to 1995 was science-fiction author
Charles Stross, Collectively, Xenix and SCO UNIX became the most installed flavor of Unix due to the popularity of the
x86 architecture. Hardware manufacturers that manufactured Intel-based systems and that resold a SCO operating system on it included not just Compaq but also
DEC,
Tandy Computers,
Siemens Nixdorf,
Olivetti,
Unisys, and
Hewlett-Packard. This effort produced the first version of Unix to support the
symmetric multiprocessing capability of Compaq's.
Applications and SCO Office Portfolio While SCO operating systems were often the basis of
vertical market software offerings by others, SCO had long desired to create additional
horizontal market software applications for its operating system product as part of further popularizing it. The portfolio primarily comprises SCO Lyrix, a word processor; SCO Professional, a spreadsheet; and SCO Integra, an SQL-based relational database. The first two were developed by SCO, augmented by a
4GL called Accell from
Unify Corporation. Linking them together was the SCO Manager, which has a character-based but multi-windowed interface. It provides desktop tools such as mail, calendaring, and chat; an expandable menu system; and a clipboard mechanism for transmitting information between applications. Early 1990 also saw the release of
Microsoft Word version 5.0 for Xenix and SCO Unix, which was also available as part of SCO Office Portfolio. It has functionality equivalent to Word for DOS, This was followed in early 1991 by Word 5.1 for SCO Unix, which has graphical user interface support. As part of adapting Word to Unix, SCO made various enhancements for multiuser support and workgroup-related features. And in mid-1990, SCO made its Word for Unix available for
AT&T 3B2 and
AT&T 6386 systems. This resulted in problems when, in July 1990,
Lotus Development Corporation sued SCO for copyright infringement, as one of several such actions that Lotus took against its imitators and competitors. The suit was settled out of court a year later; in a victory for Lotus, SCO agreed to stop all sales and licensing of SCO Professional and instead recommend that customers use 1-2-3. In the end, SCO had neither the market share nor the sales ability to compete on applications with the major players in that area such as Microsoft and Lotus.
ACE and near insolvency Besides Microsoft, venture capitalists owned about 20 percent of SCO by 1991, meaning that the Michelses owned a majority of the company, It had the goal of building the next generation commodity computing platform around the MIPS processor. Microsoft's role was to supply a version of
OS/2 for the processor SCO created a top-level business unit within the company to focus on the ACE work and the expected market resulting from it. But almost from the beginning, the ACE consortium was challenged by the difficulty of large, powerful companies with disparate interests working together; one German executive from a non-member company called ACE an "
eier-legende Wollmilchsau" (egg-laying woolen milk pig). By November 1991, SCO's work was reported as six months behind schedule. At the same time, indications were reported in trade media, the business press, and the general press that the ACE project as a whole was in trouble. In April 1992, a year after the start, the project fell apart; SCO publicly acknowledged that it had abandoned work on the Unix for MIPS and had withdrawn from the consortium, no longer confident that the project would succeed or was even necessary given improvements in CISC processor speed from Intel. Only some of the heavy engineering expenditures that SCO had spent on ACE were recoverable; Larry Michels said, "We learned a lot out of ACE. We learned the hard way." In 1992,
Software Magazine wrote that SCO had long been "the only major player in this market," but noted that
Univel and
SunSoft were both introducing Unix-on-Intel products. Both of these were from better-financed companies.
PC Magazine, in a lengthy review the following year of different operating system choices for the Intel architecture, wrote that SCO had a dominant position in the Unix-on-Intel market.
Going public By the summer of 1992, it was clear that SCO was intending to go public in the near future, and a number of investment bankers, brokers, and analysts attended that year's
SCO Forum conference with that possibility in mind. Larry Michels now viewed becoming a public company as crucial, as it would give SCO greater access to investment capital and because it would make SCO a more credible vendor to large corporations. On December 5, 1992, the
San Jose Mercury News broke the story that three former executive secretaries at SCO had filed a lawsuit two days earlier against Larry Michels and SCO for
sexual harassment. And asked if he regretted any of his actions, he said "I certainly regret that I hired those three girls." On December 15, a fourth-named former executive secretary joined the lawsuit, saying among other allegations that Michels had taken her to a remote wooded property he owned and tried to force himself on her and that she ran away for fear of being raped. Public attention to sexual harassment had increased following the previous year's
Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, On December 21, 1992, less than three weeks after initial lawsuit was filed, Larry Michels resigned as chief executive of SCO. Harris became interim president of the company. Turndal, originally from Sweden, had overseen the large growth in SCO's European operation over the preceding six years. with the four women being awarded a total of $1.25 million. At the same time, SCO filed the necessary papers with the
United States Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Michels received a $354,000 "
golden handshake" from SCO, which brought some criticism from employment rights' advocates. (Michels never returned to the company, although he kept in touch with what was going on via his son, and died of a stroke in 1999. The stock's offering price was 12 and it closed at 12, meaning that it did not have the first-day jump that "hot" IPOs are expected to show. The firm's initial stretch as a public company was difficult. Turndal further jettisoned unprofitable applications and focused on SCO's core Unix business as well as middleware additions to strengthen the platform. In December 1994, Turndal was made chair of the board as well as CEO, while Alok Mohan was elevated to president and chief operating officer. With its first release in mid-1993, Microsoft's server operating system
Windows NT became a looming threat to the Unix-on-Intel market. But there were many applications available for OpenServer, By the mid-1990s, SCO Unix in all its product releases had an installed base of a million systems sold. SCO OpenServer had a foothold in the corporate world as well; the 1997 edition of the book
UNIX Unleashed wrote that "It is very popular among corporate internets/intranets and has been for many years." The PizzaNet application software was developed by SCO's Professional Services group. PizzaNet was based on the first commercially licensed and bundled Internet operating system, SCO Global Access. On August 23, 1994, SCO broadcast a live music concert from the UC Santa Cruz's Cowell Courtyard. This event, part of SCO Forum 1994, is said to be the first time a scheduled live music concert was broadcast over the Internet; it was sent over both the
Mbone and the emerging
World Wide Web. The band was
Deth Specula, a group composed of SCO employees. Their first song parodied
Grand Funk Railroad's "
We're an American Band". Deth Specula sang "We Are an Internet Band" with lyrics like:
Everest The next big product release from the company was code-named "Everest". and software upgrades that can be run either locally or remotely. Everest was released as SCO OpenServer Release 5. The location was chosen in part to give the product an East Coast corporate veneer rather than a West Coast laid-back one. Testers of beta releases of the product, including
Taco Bell which was deploying OpenServer to each of its 4,000 stores, were impressed by its reliability. Although parts of the
Unix kernel were rewritten during the Everest project, One project which sought to improve OpenServer's technology base was code-named "MK2". Its origins date to 1992 with an agreement between SCO and the French company
Chorus Systèmes SA for cooperative work on the
Chorus microkernel technology in the context of combining OpenServer with a microkernel for use in real-time processing environments in telecommunications and other areas. The first result of this, a dual-functionality product called Chorus/Fusion for SCO Open Systems Software, was released in 1994. By 1995, SCO had set up a business unit for the MK2 venture and was spending considerable amounts of engineering resources on what was now a reimplementation of OpenServer to run on top of the Chorus microkernel, in what was going to be called the SCO Telecommunications OS Platform. A primary customer for this work was the Private Communications Systems unit within
Siemens. and the goal became to run merged OpenServer/UnixWare code on top of Chorus. However, by early 1997, relations had broken down between SCO, Chorus, and the customer, and the MK2 project was scrapped without having achieved fruition. Through several changes of corporate ownership, SCO OpenServer 5 would remain a supported product into the 2020s. On July 1, 1995, Lars Turndal retired and Alok Mohan became the company's CEO. Mohan's background was in corporate finance and strategic planning with AT&T Global Information Solutions.
Client Integration Division In February 1993, SCO acquired
IXI Limited, a software company in
Cambridge,
UK, best known for its
X.desktop product, which formed the graphical basis of Open Desktop. In December 1994, SCO bought
Visionware, of
Leeds, UK, developers of XVision. The roles of the two companies were different but complementary, as one former SCO UK employee has succinctly summarised: "IXI specialised in software that ran on Unix and made Unix easier to use. ... Visionware specialised in software that ran on Windows that made Unix easier to use." In 1995, SCO combined the two development teams to form the
IXI Visionware, Ltd. subsidiary. Later in 1995, the merged business unit was subsumed more fully into its parent and became the Client Integration Division of SCO. In May 1997, the Client Integration Division released the Vision97 family of products: XVision Eclipse (a PC
X server), VisionFS (an
SMB server for UNIX), TermVision (a
terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows), SuperVision (centralised management of users from Windows), and SQL-Retriever (
ODBC- and
JDBC-compliant database connectivity software). The VisionFS product was developed from scratch by the Cambridge development team; the other products were developed by the Leeds development team and were mostly new versions of the existing Visionware products. The SCO Unix channel-based sales model did not work well for the Vision products, ==Later history==