SCO XENIX
The saga continues
The Company
In 1979, father and son team pf Larry and Doug Michels founded Santa Cruz Operation. The company was created to focus on porting Unix system and Unix consulting. Their first product was a port of Version 7 UNIX for PDP-11 named DYNIX. Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called SCO the “first Unix company”.
In 1982, SCO and Microsoft signed a deal to jointly develop Xenix. Five years later, Microsoft decided to move on to other projects and sold Xenix to SCO. Once SCO took control of Xenix, they ported it to the 386 architecture. The last version of Xenix was released in 1991.
SCO continued to develop other Unix based products, including SCO Unix, SCO Open Desktop (the first 32-bit graphical interface for a Unix system), and Unixware 7. They also licensed and sold IXI Mosaic, one of the first commercially available web browser.
Santa Cruz Operation had a lengthy and complicated history. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
The company’s assets were eventually purchased by the SCO Group. This new organization then claimed that they owned Unix and that other Unix-like systems were violating their intellectual property. SCO Group then proceeded to try to sue end users. Thankfully, the lawsuits largely went nowhere.
If you're interested in giving Xenix a spin, you can check out PCjs. They have several versions of Xenix available to try, including Xenix 1.0, Xenix 2.0, Xenix 8086, Xenix 286, Xenix 386. WinWorld also has a bunch of options to emulate Xenix.
I also discovered an interesting article about restoring and rebuilding a corrupt version of Xenix 386. The OS/2 Museum also has a great series of articles on Xenix.
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