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I did some side work for a friend who had a shop management system (inventory, labor, work orders, etc) that ran on top of SCO, literally the only time I've eve

I did some side work for a friend who had a shop management system (inventory, labor, work orders, etc) that ran on top of SCO, literally the only time I've ever seen it in the wild. It had a couple of serial port cards with a few dumb terminals hanging off of it at various places in the shop.

Brian_K_White 6y ago
My uncle's shop was exactly like that, and that Xenix box, and then osr5, was where I cut my teeth. He is on a linux box now of course, but that last osr5 install was actually migrated to new hardware twice before finally getting the app onto linux. There was much to like and dislike about SCO. Even back before the later lawsuit people took over, it was a bit ridiculous to ship a system where you had to pay extra (after already paying $1200 or so, in '92 dollars) just to get a compiler, and extra again for tcp. They tried to justify it that most installs didn't need that stuff so by splitting them off you could pay less for just that parts you need. But that kind of doesn't wash when the most basic subset was already ridiculous. But I liked it in most other ways. It was limited and annoying by todays standards, and definitely osr5 failed to advance and became terrible to use in comparison with everything else after a while, while still somehow demanding a big price tag. But earlier, it was as good or better than anything else at that same time. People did a lot with it. I did a lot with it. One thing that was wonderful from a small custom back end software seller point of view, practically zero support overhead. You install the box and your software, and forget about it. The customer calls when they want something new or when some hardware breaks. Proper administration was what they would call neglect today. One guy could have 150 customers out there and spend 1% of his time supporting past installs. And 10 years after doing your first install, your latest install used practically identical steps and knowledge. All those 150 systems that were installed spread over a 10 or 15 year period, they all worked the same way. They were all practically identical to each other even though version numbers and hardware drivers changed. That is a level of efficiency and low overhead that we'll never see again. Today you might be able to magic up 150 servers in a few seconds and a few lines of cloud orchestration config code, but tomorrow everything you learned to do that today will be different, and you better stay actively on top of monitoring them, none of this fire & forget like ye olden dayes.

Brian_K_White 6y ago

My uncle's shop was exactly like that, and that Xenix box, and then osr5, was where I cut my teeth. He is on a linux box now of course, but that last osr5 install was actually migrated to new hardware twice before finally getting the app onto linux. There was much to like and dislike about SCO. Even back before the later lawsuit people took over, it was a bit ridiculous to ship a system where you had to pay extra (after already paying $1200 or so, in '92 dollars) just to get a compiler, and extra again for tcp. They tried to justify it that most installs didn't need that stuff so by splitting them off you could pay less for just that parts you need. But that kind of doesn't wash when the most basic subset was already ridiculous. But I liked it in most other ways. It was limited and annoying by todays standards, and definitely osr5 failed to advance and became terrible to use in comparison with everything else after a while, while still somehow demanding a big price tag. But earlier, it was as good or better than anything else at that same time. People did a lot with it. I did a lot with it. One thing that was wonderful from a small custom back end software seller point of view, practically zero support overhead. You install the box and your software, and forget about it. The customer calls when they want something new or when some hardware breaks. Proper administration was what they would call neglect today. One guy could have 150 customers out there and spend 1% of his time supporting past installs. And 10 years after doing your first install, your latest install used practically identical steps and knowledge. All those 150 systems that were installed spread over a 10 or 15 year period, they all worked the same way. They were all practically identical to each other even though version numbers and hardware drivers changed. That is a level of efficiency and low overhead that we'll never see again. Today you might be able to magic up 150 servers in a few seconds and a few lines of cloud orchestration config code, but tomorrow everything you learned to do that today will be different, and you better stay actively on top of monitoring them, none of this fire & forget like ye olden dayes.