It was (at that time) the best Unix on cheap x86 hardware, so it was deployed everywhere. In gas station pumps, in cash registers, in ATMs, in back office databases. I think SCO made up the majority of Oracle database instances.
Most people interacted with SCO code on a daily basis but didn’t know.
Of course they rapidly lost the x86 UNIX crown to Linux. At the time I was there SCO could still do a lot of stuff well that Linux couldn’t, but the advantages were rapidly going down and the writing was on the wall.
> SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies.
In a way this was a proxy war of Microsoft vs Linux.
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[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sco-linux-fud-returns-from-the...
Small enough to not have a “big company” feel, yet profitable enough (at that time) to not have “startup panic”. Plus lots of cool hackers, including some of the original authors of UNIX, who had joined through the AT&T deal.
SCO had a collaboration with IBM called Project Monterey, in which SCO and IBM were merging their operating systems in order to be better positioned for IA64 (which at that point people still thought would be good).
One minor detail of the Monterey deal was that SCO got the right to port IBM's superior networking stack into SCO's operating systems. One part of IBM's networking stack was their implementation of the Berkeley Packet Filter, and that was one of the parts I ported over (I'm pretty sure the file still had a BSD copyright notice on it).
That was back in the days when SCO was a cool UNIX vendor that thought of itself as an extension of UC Santa Cruz. Back then employees couldn't really imagine it turning evil, and it made me wary of what my subsequent employers (Google and Facebook) could turn into.