The Santa Cruz Operation
| Private | |
| Fate | 2001, sold off Unix assets and renamed as Tarantella, Inc. |
| Successor | Tarantella, Inc. |
| Founded | 1979 |
| Founder | Doug Michels Larry Michels |
| Defunct | Superseded by Tarantella, Inc. |
Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) was a software company based in Santa Cruz, California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Intel x86 processors: Xenix, SCO UNIX (later known as SCO OpenServer), and UnixWare. Eric Raymond, in his book The Art of Unix Programming, calls SCO the "first Unix company". Prior to this, some prominent Unix vendors had been computer hardware manufacturers and telephone companies.
In 1993, SCO acquired two smaller companies and developed the Tarantella product line. In 2001, SCO sold its rights to Unix and the related divisions to Caldera Systems. After that the corporation retained only its Tarantella product line, and changed its name to Tarantella, Inc.
Caldera Systems becoming Caldera International subsequently changed its name to SCO then to The SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX; now delisted: SCOXQ.PK), which has created some confusion between the two companies. The company described here is the original Santa Cruz Operation (NASDAQ: SCOC). Although generally referred to simply as "SCO" up to 2001, it is now sometimes referred to as "old SCO", "Santa Cruz", or "SCO Classic" to distinguish it from "The SCO Group" to whom the U.S. trademark "SCO" was transferred.
SCO was founded in 1979, by Doug Michels and his father, Larry, as a Unix porting and consulting company. The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. was incorporated in January, 1979.
In 1983, SCO ported Xenix to the unmapped Intel 8086 processor (earlier 8086 Xenix ports required an off-chip MMU) and licensed rights from Microsoft to be able to ship its packaged Unix System, Xenix for the IBM PC XT. SCO Xenix for the PC (XT) shipped sometime in 1984 and contained some enhancement from 4.2BSD. Somewhat in parallel with that, SCO and Microsoft also developed the 68000-based Xenix port for the Apple Lisa; this was actually the first shrink-wrapped binary product sold by SCO.
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