SCO Out

I've been sad to read over the last few years about the woes of SCO, the once great Unix vendor; at least in my opinion.  At my first IT job there were minicomputers running a customized cut of SCO, I remember a new bunch of server hardware from Compaq coming in and the delight of the IT manager esconsing himself in the dark musty old design office (literally a dark dungeon) and getting on with installing the system.

He literally put the system together on the machine, set up the RAID and everything in the dark at the keyboard.

That job was my first taste of server operations on "medium" iron (minicomputers) and I've been fascinated with servers and setting them up ever since; not that my current employer has noticed this in any reasonable fashion.

Today though SCO are in the news as filing for the final embers of bankruptcy they're down and out and going to be gone, a shame, I remember their service as excellent here in the UK and their software... Well in two years tending the flaky NCR based minicomputer I never had it tip over and as far as I know the Compaq kit to replace it was destined to live out a life of 15 planned years...

At the same time I saw this SCO jump up a level I was introduced to the AS400 from IBM, and was woefully underwhelmed, the SCO running machine we'd just had set up cost in the region of 7K and was designed to run something like 15 sites throughout Northern England, as well as collate a warehouse, stock and tabulate sales.  The AS400 I was introduced to cost something in the region of 12K, was the near as makes no difference same specification, carried a huge service & support cost to it and was only going to run about 50 hand-held scanners and control stock in one warehouse... It literally beggars belief the different in performance.

So, with the going down of the Sun over SCO (no pun intended) I for one saulte the memory of that blue yellow and white packaging arriving, and how it brought that system alive through tender carressing, not through leaving the man in IBM white uniforms to their blackbox of tricks.