Tarantella was a line of products developed by a branch of the company Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) since 1993.

In 1993, Santa Cruz Operation acquired IXI Limited, a software company in Cambridge, UK, best known for its X.desktop product.

In 1997 the Client Integration Division released the Vision97 (later Vision2K) family of products: XVision Eclipse (a PC X server), VisionFS (an SMB server for UNIX), TermVision (a terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows), SuperVision (centralised management of users from Windows), SQL-Retriever (ODBC-compliant database connectivity software, later dropped) and TermLite (a lightweight version of TermVision).

In November 2000 version 3.0 of the product was released, including a major rewrite of much server-side code in the Java language.

At the same time it bought New Moon Systems, developers of Canaveral iQ, a terminal services application for Microsoft Windows that competed directly with Citrix.

In July, CEO Doug Michels stated that "isolated business practices" in the European Sales territory would affect revenues for the previous quarter.

In September 2003 the Chairman of the Board (and former SCO CEO) Alok Mohan became acting Chief Financial Officer, replacing Randall Bresee.

At the same time US$16 million of additional investment was received, and in March the company acquired Caststream, Inc., a provider of collaboration software.

[2] On May 10, 2005 it was announced that Sun Microsystems would be acquiring Tarantella for $25 million cash, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

[3] Sun posted a letter to Tarantella customers indicating the company would be wholly assimilated after 90 days; on July 13, 2005, it was announced the acquisition was completed.

In July, 2005 Sun licensed the Microsoft Windows Terminal Server based Tarantella product SGD-TSE (formerly New Moon Canaveral IQ) to the UK-based company ProPalms.