AT&T jacked their license prices for SVR 4 so much that going to true SRV 4 would have drastically raised the price of Open Desktop. The AU/X 'additional' features from SVR 3 and SVR 4 was probably the result of a similar process to SCO's cloning of SVR4 features in the early 90s. SCO also paid royalties to Microsoft every time we sold the developer tools, because SCO had inherited the MS C compiler by way of their Xenix license in the late 80s, and SCO SVR3.2 was built using MS C. This drove the price of a copy of ODT 3 up to the $1000-2000 mark depending on trim. (Linus couldn't afford his own Intel UNIX shrinkwrap, so he began rolling his own kernel.) I heard a ballpark figure that SCO paid out $200 in royalties every time they sold a copy of Open Desktop 3.0, which included royalties on SVR3.2, a third-party TCP/IP stack, X11 (which was free), and OSF Motif (which wasn't) and IXI's X Desktop (the desktop and utility apps build with Motif/X11).

I don't have any direct knowledge of Apple's licensing issues with AT&T, but I worked for SCO in the early 90s, back when it was a UNIX OEM, not a litigation zombie.ĪT&T licensing fees for UNIX back in the late 80s/early 90s were fiendish that's the whole reason for the ascendancy of Linux today. It also had a TCP/IP stack, since before MacTCP (if I recall correctly). A few of the old games can be played on new computers-if it ever got a PC port, there’s a chance you can run it in DOSBox, but the Mac exclusives got left behind, and a bunch of them were just cute little shareware pieces that never had a bunch of money behind them.Ī/UX was forked from UNIX System V Release 2.2, with 'additional features from System V Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3'. The only reason I still go back is for the games. As much as Unix is a bit of a mess, it doesn’t have any of these problems.

Still waiting for Google Docs to catch up in terms of feature parity, it’s not even close. the best version of Microsoft Word ever made. Install an app by dragging it to your hard drive, uninstall it by dragging it to the trash. Poking around in MacsBug or ResEdit was interesting. The entire experience of using a computer was very consistent. There are some things I really miss about the classic Mac era. This was how we knew what Apple was doing, how to keep computers running, etc.

I like the weird studio photography they would do with a bunch of hardware on weird pedestals.

The magazine archives linked from the article really take me back.

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