OT: Question re: SCO Use

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005, Tim Fischer wrote:
>You know, John's recent posts have brought up a good question to me.  
>Why SCO?  I mean, I've noticed a lot of SCO based questions here.  Both 
>FP shops that I've worked in were SCO shops when I started.  Is there 
>some old relationship between FP & SCO?  Is there a general consensus 
>here that SCO is better?  Easier?  Is it cheaper?  (I have no idea about 
>licensing with them.)

There's some fairly ancient history involved here.  Filepro was born years
ago as profile II on the Radio Shack Model II (actually profile something
on the Radio Shack Model I/III/IV).  It then morphed into Profile-16 Plus
on Radio Shack Xenix, then to FilePro on non-Tandy systems.

Many of the folks on this list have been using Profile->FilePro since the
early '80s and went from the Radio Shack Profile to FilePro, and the Xenix
that Radio Shack used on their x286 and x386 machines was basically SCO
Xenix with SCSI support, then became pure SCO Xenix in the late '80s.

For many years, SCO Xenix and SCO Unix were the most cost-effective
solutions for small to medium businesses, and they were generally very
stable, if boring, *nix implementations.  Linux started becoming serious
competition to SCO systems in the late '90s.

In my case, some of my first applications were built on Profile II back in
1981 or so, running on TRSDOS on the Model IIs.  I migrated these to
Profile-16 plus shortly after I started running Xenix on the Radio Shack
Model 16 in 1982, then to Profile-16 Plus in '84 or so (at which time I
moved my major development work to the Unify RDBMS and off of FilePro).  We
continued to use SCO operating systems primarily until 1997 when we started
moving things to Caldera Linux.  We used Xenix until 1992 when SCO's first
usable Unix, version 3.2v4.x, came out, moving to OpenServer in 1995.

As someone else pointed out, inertia is a major factor for many staying on
SCO systems.  Another factor is the cost of switching from systems that
have been stable for years (decades) to newer hardware and software.

Bill
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