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It kind of had its heyday in the awkward era where PCs were _just_ powerful enough to finally run Unix decently but before Linux was considered mainstream or mature enough. And that was a very short period, maybe 92-95 or so?

Its predecessor, Xenix, may have had more brand awareness?

I remember a summer job I had, 1998. Contracting doing basic sysadmin stuff for a subsidiary of IBM. I wanted to install Linux on a PC to do some stuff, mostly account password stress testing, etc. Got sign off from most of the team, but one guy dug his foot in... "we should use a real Unix. This Linux thing could get us in trouble. We should be using SCO" He got some funny looks. The next year all of IBM was all-in on Linux, big corporate strategy.



SCO's peak was in the late 1980s, when 286 and 386 systems cost a lot less than a more "serious" UNIX box


SCO wasn't released until 89. Before that it was Xenix.

I remember my high school gf's father had a SCO Unix machine in his office. This was about 1991 I guess. At the time I was an Atari ST user, and just salivated at Unix machines (my luckier/older/wealthier Atari user friends had TT030s and got to play with Unix on them). Once she let me sneak into his office and play with it when he wasn't around, illicit unixing... was very exciting for me :-)

A few months later I got a 486 for graduation present and installed Linux 0.97 on it.


And if you didn't need the extra power you could get all the suffering of a Sun box for the cost of a common office PC.

I think that's why I've seen very few workstations using it, but it's pretty common as a shared industrial system. If you need a single user system you'd just use DOS, if you need a powerful workhorse you'd get a fancier system, possibly some newfangled RISC machine, but if you need a multitasking system and don't need much power for any individual task it's ideal.




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