Through Univel, a partnership with Novell, it was also responsible for the development and production of the UnixWare packaged operating system for Intel architecture.

Created from earlier AT&T entities, USL was, as industry writer Christopher Negus has observed, the culmination of AT&T's long involvement in Unix, "a jewel that couldn't quite find a home or a way to make a profit.

USO included the AT&T Data Systems Group organizations responsible for UNIX product planning and management, licensing, and marketing.

[4] The USO/USL staff was heavily involved in the creation of UNIX System V Release 4, which shipped in 1989 and was a joint project with Sun Microsystems.

[12] This manifested itself in System V Release 4.1 ES (Enhanced Security), which also included generally useful features such as support for dynamic loading of kernel modules.

[14] InfoWorld characterized this effort as "at the core of an assault on the enterprise networking market," with a modular architecture that stressed improved support for enterprise- and network-level administration, drivers for both Token Ring and Ethernet, and a greater ability to run on low-end machine configurations.

[24] Indeed, the paper describing one of the first implementations of automatic instantiation of C++ templates in a C++ compiler had as lead author an engineer associated with Unix System Laboratories.

[25][26] And Margaret A. Ellis, co-author with C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup of The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, an important publication in the history of the language, was a USL software engineer.

[24] USL also continued the development of, and attempted to market, C++ Standard Components, an early instance of a C++ software foundation library that supported container classes and various other computer science-based functionality such as finite-state machines, graphs, and regular expressions.

[27][28] The Standard Components originated in conjunction with early developments in the C++ language in Bell Labs and became widely used internally within AT&T,[24] by one estimate being used in hundreds of projects.

[32] In April 1991, USL became partly independent of AT&T when about 22 percent of it, worth about $65 million, was sold to eleven outside computer vendors: Amdahl, Motorola, Novell, Sun, ICL, Olivetti, Fujitsu, NEC, OKI Electric, Toshiba, and the Institute for Information Industry.

[33] USL got a new president and CEO in November 1991 when Dooling was replaced by the Dutchman Roel Pieper, formerly chief technical officer of Software AG.

[34] USL was aggressive in defending its perceived intellectual property rights, initiating as the plaintiff a lawsuit in 1992 against Berkeley Software Design makers of and the Regents of the University of California over copyrights and trademarks related to Unix.

[37] The goal was to make the "Destiny" desktop for Intel commodity hardware, which would be USL's first shrink-wrapped binary product, with the necessary resources for sales, marketing, and distribution being moved into the new entity.

[38] Kanwal Rekhi, a Novell vice president who helped launch Univel, said the goal was to create a "Unix for the masses".

"[40] In another interview around the same time, Pieper predicted that if the new Unix became a success, USL revenue could increase ten-fold to $1 billion within five years.

The MoOLIT toolkit was used for the windowing system, allowing the user to choose between an OPEN LOOK or MOTIF-like look and feel at run time.

[46][47] The move seemed like a long shot to analysts, with a commentary piece in Computerworld outlining the obstacles to success and stating, "Saying this deal has the technical potential to counter Windows NT is very different from predicting that it will do so.

[51] The Chorus work it was doing became the basis for the Novell "SuperNOS", a project to create a microkernel-based, UnixWare–NetWare hybrid, network operating system.

[54] Novell announced the sale of Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, coincident with a licensing arrangement with Hewlett-Packard, in September 1995.

[55] Following another change of ownership, the renamed The SCO Group and the Unix System V source base became elements of the SCO–Linux disputes.

In the view of writer Christopher Negus, "The UNIX Laboratory was considered a jewel that couldn't quite find a home or a way to make a profit.

"[1] However Negus believes that in three crucial respects USL's actions – in continuing to release a source code product to its partners, in working to define industry standards such as POSIX, and in making decisions on the direction of Unix based on technical merit not corporate advantage – paved the way for the rise of a Unix-like entity such as the Linux operating system, and that this beneficial historical role has been obscured by the SCO–Linux controversies.