[Smaug] SCO - was A quick scripting puzzle

[Anthony Ettinger]

ot

--- Meg McRoberts <dreidellhasa at yahoo.com> wrote:

> This is very interesting...  How many ex-SCO-ites
> are
> on this list?  This isn't exactly how it looked from
> the inside...
> 
> Xenix ran on the 286.  SCO UNIX was based on the
> SVR3
> kernel, which SCO licensed from AT&T.  I think the
> original
> UNIX systems SCO produced were marketed as SCO UNIX,
> then
> the marketing folks changed the name to OpenServer
> to reflect
> what was then an "open architecture" -- certainly
> not Open
> Source but with full support for third party
> software at
> both the user and kernel level.  As I recall, for a
> year
> or two, we had the non-graphical SCO UNIX and
> OpenServer
> was SCO UNIX with X11 and the graphical desktop on
> top.
> 
> We did invest a lot in providing backward
> compatibility
> for Xenix drivers and applications and almost
> everything
> did run on OpenServer.
> 
> SCO had a phenomenal licensing agreement for the
> SVR3
> kernel so it was never feasible to port to an SVR4
> base
> although we incorporated many SVR4 features into the
> OpenServer kernel.
> 
> UnixWare as well as ownership of all the SVR kernels
> came
> with the 1995 acquisition.  The original plan was to
> do
> a system that incorporated the elegant kernel
> technology
> of UnixWare with the OpenServer user interface,
> which was
> very popular with the customers.  Alas, political
> skirmishes
> prevented that from happening at the time although I
> hear
> that the new release does exactly that.
> 
> It is interesting that the view from outside SCO is
> that,
> since SCO could run most Xenix applications and
> drivers,
> it WAS Xenix...
> 
> meg
> 
> --- Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
> > Quoting cerise at armory.com (cerise at armory.com):
> > 
> > > OpenServer took much of its userspace from SCO
> XENIX and much of the
> > > underlying structure from SCO UNIX.
> > 
> > There was an import of some code into XENIX from
> SysV r3, under
> > a licence deal from AT&T -- not from "SCO UNIX",
> as there was (really)
> > no such thing at the time.  (See below.)
> > 
> > [The Open UNIX aka ex-UnixWare product:]
> > 
> > > I can only attest to a horrible userspace.
> > 
> > Oh yeah.  
> > 
> > I was proud owner in around 1989 of AT&T System V
> release 3.22, which I 
> > picked up for $50 from Data Preference in San
> Mateo:  It was just
> > thoroughly awful in dozens of ways, including the
> absence of "Berkeley 
> > enhancements" that were later merged into the
> system when they created
> > System Vr4.  It didn't last long on my system,
> since I knew from using
> > BSD at Evans Hall, UCB, that Unix didn't _have_ to
> suck that badly.  The 
> > only part that I kept (for a decade) was the shelf
> of manuals that came
> > with it.  That part was cool.  
> > 
> > I also bought and used for a while, a couple of
> years later, one of
> > Novell's UnixWare releases (based, obviously, on
> SysVr4).  That was one
> > of the ones that included the ability to run Win16
> desktop applications,
> > which was really wacky to see on your Motif/X11
> desktop.  The suckage
> > was gone, but it was a little ponderous and slow,
> and I pitched it for
> > 386BSD 0.1 and later Linux.
> > 
> > > Now, SCO UNIX (also known as SCO SystemV/386)
> coexisted with XENIX
> > > (and, in fact, I have a handy driver book here
> which details the
> > > differences between the two and the steps needed
> to port drivers from
> > > one to the other.  That particular line
> disappeared as OpenServer
> > > became the clear choice between the two.
> > 
> > Um, "SCO System V/386" was yet another name for
> one of the XENIX
> > releases.  It's entirely possible they might have
> paid AT&T the
> > necessary trademark licensing fees to use the name
> "UNIX" for one of
> > those, but it really never was _UNIX_ in the sense
> that its foundational
> > kernel, libs, and other basic architecture were
> still XENIX, not UNIX.
> > That was the product line that eventually came to
> be called Open Server,
> > which is what they (or rather, their Utah
> successor in interest) call it
> > now.
> > 
> > That's all one product, not two.  XENIX = SCO
> System V/386 = Open Server.
> > If they called that thing "SCO UNIX" during the
> pre-Novell-deal time
> > period (which is possible, though I never saw it),
> then that was
> > strictly a marketing label:  It was still really
> XENIX.
> > 
> > SCO didn't have a "genetic" UNIX (to borrow Peter
> Salus's term) until
> > the 1995 purchase of certain (disputed) UnixWare
> rights from Novell.
> > _That_ is SCO Group's second product line.
> > 
> > But, frankly, I considered both of them pretty
> terrible even compared to
> > 386BSD 0.1.  ;->
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Smaug mailing list
> > Smaug at lists.svlug.org
> > http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/smaug
> > Smaug home page: http://www.scruz.org/
> > 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Smaug mailing list
> Smaug at lists.svlug.org
> http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/smaug
> Smaug home page: http://www.scruz.org/
> 


Anthony Ettinger
ph: (408) 656-2473
web: http://www.apwebdesign.com