History
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 Intel 8086 processor and licensed rights from Microsoft to be able to ship its first packaged Unix System, Xenix 1.0 for the IBM PC XT. Xenix was derived from UNIX System III, incorporating elements from BSD. In 1987, SCO ported Xenix to the Intel 80386 processor. The same year Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO.
In 1986, SCO acquired the Software Products Group division of UK consultancy firm Logica to form their European headquarters. Gary Daniels, Steve Brophy, Bill Bateson, Geraint Davies, and Peter Kettle headed this group, running European development operations. The European arm of SCO grew rapidly to about 40% of SCO's worldwide revenues.
In 1989, SCO started producing SCO UNIX from a more recent branch from the Unix family tree, System V Release 3.2.
The initial version of SCO UNIX, Release 3.2.0, did not include TCP/IP networking or X Window System graphics. Shortly after the release of this product, SCO shipped SCO Open Desktop, with both.
Collectively, Xenix and SCO UNIX became the most installed flavor of Unix due to the popularity of the x86 architecture.
The company went public in 1993 on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange.
1994 saw the release of SCO MPX, a supporting SMP for SCO UNIX.
Read more about this topic: Santa Cruz Operation
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