Open Desktop (SCO)
More info
- Creator
- Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)
- Released
- Type
- Operating system
- License
- Proprietary
- Successor
- SCO OpenServer 5 (1995)
SCO's 1990 bundle of Unix, X11, Motif and a desktop for an ordinary 386 PC: the first graphical 32-bit system for the PC, three years ahead of Windows NT.
The Santa Cruz Operation had been selling Xenix to the PC world since the early 1980s, and in 1989 it showed what would come next: Open Desktop, shipped in 1990. In the box were SCO UNIX System V/386, X11, OSF/Motif, IXI's X.desktop as the desktop, Locus Merge for running DOS programs in windows, TCP/IP and NFS, and in the first release an Ingres database as well. Everything came installed and integrated, which at the time was the actual product; anyone who had tried to assemble the same thing from parts knew why.
The price was the hardware. Open Desktop wanted a 386 or 486 with eight megabytes of memory and a large disk when a PC normally had two, and it earned a reputation for being slow. It still sold at retail and to small businesses that needed several terminals on one machine, and went through two major updates. In 1995 SCO merged Open Desktop with its server edition into OpenServer Release 5, and the name disappeared. By then the phrase "desktop environment" was already coming to mean CDE.