SCO bought two former Xenix outfits, the Software Products Group within Logica in 1986 and HCR Corporation in 1990, thereby gaining development offices in Watford, England and Toronto, Canada.

"[19] Pure consulting work held little ongoing appeal,[15] and the notion of helping large businesses manage rapid technological change proved difficult in practice.

[30] The product can support ten remote users via serial ports and was sold with optional packages for software development in C or assembly language and for text processing.

[37] In 1987, the company brought out the SCO Xenix 386 Toolkit, which allowed developers to start coding applications and device drivers for the new Intel 80386 processor in addition to the existing 80286.

[15] But the real value came from the 1,700 other applications that had been developed by value-added resellers (VARs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) for the platform, including such domains as auto parts management, medical accounting, bakery process control, and many others.

[47] Yet another explanation was the one given by Larry Michels in 1991, making reference to the SCO Unix product then being sold: "The paradox is if you were Microsoft, Open Desktop isn't something you want to see succeed.

[45] However, Open Desktop did not make inroads on the personal computer market, as SCO Unix's system resource requirements were strenuous and there were few commonly used PC applications available for it.

[76] SCO had a large technical publications operation at this time, with substantial staffing in each of the Santa Cruz, Toronto, and Watford offices, who as a group published on the order of 30,000 pages of documentation on a 18-month release cycle.

[97] There were a number of companies involved, but in term of the major players, it consisted of Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, DEC and the Santa Cruz Operation.

[4][54] The year saw a large-scale reduction in staffing levels from that peak of 1,300 – with around 12 percent of the workforce being let go across two rounds of layoffs – together with a company-wide reorganization that involved new managers being brought in from other technology companies.

[108] PC Magazine, in a lengthy review the following year of different operating system choices for the Intel architecture, wrote that SCO had a dominant position in the Unix-on-Intel market.

[22] The magazine added that with its "Tyrannosaurus Rex"-like presence and more than 3,000 applications available, independent software vendors interested in Unix on PCs invariably made products that were SCO Unix-conformant.

[112] Public attention to sexual harassment had increased following the previous year's Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings,[109] and complaints had been filed with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing against other high-level male executives at SCO as well.

[117] Programs begun by Harris, and continued by Turndal, sought to introduce to the company externally-provided classes in cultural sensitivity and to establish an internal diversity council.

This event, part of SCO Forum 1994, is said to be the first time a scheduled live music concert was broadcast over the Internet; it was sent over both the Mbone and the emerging World Wide Web.

[165] "White Box" became the 3DA effort, the purpose of which was to unify OpenServer, UnixWare, and HP-UX in some way to produce a resulting product would then become the de facto Unix standard for both existing IA-32 systems and the upcoming IA-64.

[168] By August 1996, HP and SCO were delivering application programming interface (API) specifications to various OEMs and ISVs, as well as doing a best-of-breed technology analysis to determine whether Gemini or HP-UX would be the going-forward source base for a given component.

[169] The effort was still in theory going in early 1997, when HP and SCO were to publish the "Lodi" set of common programming interfaces for a 64-bit Unix incorporating elements of OpenServer, UnixWare, and HP-UX.

[170] The collaboration failed for both business reasons – HP and SCO had differing perceptions of the marketplace – and technical ones – an inability to produce a common binary Unix-for-Intel product that could run existing applications from both companies' user bases.

[176] What the New Jersey group produced was the Universal Development Kit (UDK),[174] which was a key element in the question of how to help OpenServer users to make the move to Gemini.

[160] Hardware vendors already supporting UnixWare 7 included IBM, HP, Compaq, and Tandem, despite some of them offering their own Unix flavors on their high-end RISC systems.

[184] A review in InfoWorld said that "UnixWare 7 is the sturdiest and most feature-rich Unix ever ported to Intel processors" and added that, especially with the addition of the webtop interface, the 7.1 release was equal in polish to Windows NT.

[55] Being a software-only company whose revenue was only around the $200 million mark left SCO with marginal resources to compete with Unixes from the big RISC vendors like Digital, HP, and Sun.

"[212] The channel inventory was emptied by July 1998 and the new electronic licensing was in effect the following month for a new point release of OpenServer 5, the product that was still accounting for some 80 percent of SCO's Unix revenues.

[214] The core idea of Project Monterey was to take elements from IBM's AIX, Sequent's DYNIX/ptx, and SCO's UnixWare, to form a merged 64-bit Unix for Intel's Merced architecture.

"[225] On August 2, 2000, following several months of negotiations, SCO announced that it would sell its Server Software and Services Divisions, including UnixWare, to the Linux company Caldera Systems.

Those familiar with the Santa Cruz Operation, including those who worked there and those who wrote about it, became protective of that company's reputation, especially given the possible name confusion regarding the role The SCO Group played in the attacks on Linux.

[51] The Vice President of Marketing and Communications was, through much of the 1980s and early 1990s, Bruce Steinberg, who was an artist and musician in the San Francisco area music scene,[241] whose credits included having designed the "flying toasters" cover of the Jefferson Airplane's 1973 live album Thirty Seconds Over Winterland.

"[105] The SCO reputation was exemplified by an oft-related story of a time where the company had to put out a rule that "clothing must be worn during office hours," caused by an instance where someone walking in from the hot tub had not done so and a potential corporate partner had been paying a visit.

Called SCO Forum, it was held on the University of California, Santa Cruz's scenic redwood-forested campus overlooking Monterey Bay, drew some 2000–3000 attendees, and lasted for much of a week.