A.P. Lawrence

Why is SCO OSR5 Unix so ancient?

Mon Jul 5 20:02:48 2004 Why is SCO OSR5 Unix so ancient?
Posted by Tony Lawrence
Referencing: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=f53bd9d.0407021948.37693114@posting.google.com

SCO Unix OSR5 is depressingly ancient when its functionality is compared to Linux and other more modern Unixes. 2 GB file size limits, no threads, oh the list goes on and on. A number of factors have contributed to that, and the biggest cause was its popularity: try as they would, SCO couldn't get many people to give up their OSR5 and move to the much more modern Unixware. Naturally, SCO didn't want to invest a lot of money in fixing this old stuff when they had another, much better, product. On the other hand, customers demanded it. OSR5 was very much neglected with very little attention given it for many years, but more recently it has started to be revamped and reputedly will actually sport a Unixware kernel in the next release. The old limitations and missing features will start to disappear (assuming that this stupid lawsuit doesn't kill them, of course).

The poster here was having extreme difficulty adding an IDE drive. Even in the most ancient OSR5 versions, that isn't usually particularly difficult, so he probably had some hardware issue that wasn't immediately obvious. His struggles caused one of the resident Linuxoids to comment "The 80's called - they want their Unix back!" - which isn't tremendously unfair if you don't know the background.

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