Univel existed only briefly in the period between AT&T initially divesting parts of USL in 1991, and its eventual outright purchase by Novell, which completed in June 1993,[2][3] thereby acquiring rights to the Unix operating system.

The idea to combine forces originated during 1991, with USL chief Roel Pieper believing that the advent of 32-bit applications and workgroup computing gave Unix its best chance yet to gain widespread acceptance.

[4] In particular, Novell executive vice president Kanwal Rekhi played a significant role in the formation and launching of Univel.

[7] The headquarters for Univel was in Novell's offices in San Jose, California,[9][2] where much of the sales and marketing effort also took place.

[11][12] Finally, there was also a small group in USL's offices in Summit, New Jersey assigned to the Univel effort, whose roles included ISV support engineering.

[10] The MoOLIT toolkit is used for the windowing system, allowing the user to choose between an OPEN LOOK or MOTIF-like look and feel at runtime.

[14] Of prime importance was that a system running UnixWare could be easily incorporated into a NetWare-based local area network.

[19] A key distinction between the two flavors was that the Personal Edition comes with only NetWare's IPX/SPX networking stack, whereas the Application Server comes with TCP/IP as well; the absence of TCP/IP in the desktop release, unless ordered as an add-on, served to annoy many Unix proponents.

[15] InfoWorld praised the "multilayered architecture that neatly supports multiple graphical user interfaces, several Unix file systems, and NetWare interoperability.

[11] However, another industry account portrayed Novell briefers as saying in August 1993 that Univel was the entity actively working on the follow-on UnixWare 1.1 release.

[23] Industry news releases were still referring to UnixWare as a product of Univel into 1994,[24] but the name subsequently fell into disuse.