[ale] Do not fight the Nazgul

[Jeff Hubbs]

Sometime around 1993 while working for the US Deparment of Energy's 
Savannah River Operations Office, I attended a seminar held at a uni in 
Kansas City (perhaps UMKC; I don't remember) about X.400 messaging. It 
was held in a interoperability lab where they were trying to cobble 
together collections of various X.400 apps as well as platforms and 
network stacks. I remember that they had several x86 PCs that could 
dual-boot between Windows 3.1 and something that I think was called 
Interactive Unix. It was this experience plus my prior experience with 
Banyan VINES (a network OS that was based on AT&T System V that ran 
behind the scenes and made Novell NetWare look like it was produced by 
Fisher-Price) was what got me on the idea of putting serious 
DEC-VMS-level OSses on x86 hardware and by 1995 I began investigating 
Linux and some shrinkwapped curiosity from Microsoft called Windows NT 
that I had seen demonstrated at a trade show but no one else seemed to 
know anything about.

On 3/3/16 11:31 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
>
> We actually had one of our customers (a chain of 20+ hotels) running 
> 286 machines with an early (1.x) SCO Xenix.    Those were my least 
> favorite calls to deal with because that early version of Xenix didn’t 
> have many of the tools UNIX of the same era.     I never worked on it 
> but there was apparently a MS Xenix at one point.
>
> You didn’t need Google back then because you actually got manuals with 
> most products.   SCO’s UNIX manuals were fairly well done including 
> the indexes.   We also used Informix and while it had very detailed 
> manuals the indexes in them weren’t very good at all.    (Ironic that 
> a DBMS manual had poor “indexes”.)  To learn how to create an “outer 
> join” in Informix I had to essentially skim the entire manual to learn 
> that was what it was called – I’d previously simply done it by putting 
> checkmarks on the screen in an earlier DOS install of Paradox.
>
> *From:*ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] *On Behalf Of 
> *Scott Plante
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 03, 2016 11:20 AM
> *To:* Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> *Subject:* Re: [ale] Do not fight the Nazgul
>
> We used to take 386s and load SCO Xenix on them, with an 8 
> port serial card with Link dumb terminals attached. And our customers 
> would pound away on the app we wrote with Progress database/4GL all 
> day and it kept up pretty well. It's hard to remember how we ever got 
> any of that stuff to work without being able to Google up answers on 
> the Internet--oh yeah, those multi-hour calls with hardware tech 
> support. Good times!
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From: *"Jeff Lightner" <JLightner at dsservices.com 
> <mailto:JLightner at dsservices.com>>
> *To: *"Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>>
> *Sent: *Thursday, March 3, 2016 9:32:04 AM
> *Subject: *Re: [ale] Do not fight the Nazgul
>
> Me too - I liked Caldera because it had licensed Wabi from Sun so I 
> could run my company's required Windows based tools under my Linux 
> workstation.
>
> I made my living on SCO Unix for a while before that and really liked 
> it.   They took what as good about SVR4 and augmented their original 
> SVR3.2 stuff with it without taking a lot of the crap I didn't like 
> about SVR4 in AT&T/NCR Unix SVR4.    For a long time SCO was the UNIX 
> of choice for x86 systems.     One benefit to it was they did a lot of 
> work with various hardware vendors to insure SCO would run on their 
> systems unlike many other variants that were made by the hardware 
> vendors and required their hardware.
>
>
>
>
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