Santa Cruz Operation

The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (SCO) sold a Unix variant called SCO UNIX running on Intel x86 processors.

SCO was founded in 1979 by Doug and Larry Michels as a UNIX porting and consulting company. In 1983 they shipped XENIX for the Intel processor, their first packaged UNIX System. Xenix, renamed SCO UNIX in 1989 following SCO's port to the Intel 80386 processor chip, became the most installed flavor of UNIX due to the popularity of the x86 architecture. The company went public in 1993 on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. In 1995 it acquired the AT&T UNIX source from Novell and the UnixWare operating system, at which time it renamed SCO UNIX as OpenServer.

SCO announced on August 2, 2001 that they would sell their Server Software and Services Divisions, as well as UnixWare[?] and OpenServer technologies, to Caldera Systems, Inc. The purchase was completed in May 2001, and Caldera changed its name to Caldera International in May 2001. The remaining part of SCO, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to Tarantella, Inc.

In August 2002, Caldera International changed its name to "SCO Group" to reemphasize its SCO Unix heritage. It is the SCO Group, and not the Tarantella or the Santa Cruz Operation, that started suing IBM in 2003 for $1 billion for allegedly "devaluing" Unix by contibuting to the Unix-like Linux operating system. See the article SCO v. IBM Linux lawsuit for more details on that lawsuit.