Before the major computer firms got into Unix, there was BSD direct from Berkeley. It was free as a binary to educational and research institutions, but a source licence cost $1000. Not quite open source.
Original BSD did not even have gzip, it used compress (.Z) and it was not integrated with tar.
1 Like
Actually - I forgot to point the finger of accusation at Santa Cruz Corporation… what a diabolical piece of crap SCO “OpenServer” (sic) was… Oh - your big fat pentium pro server has two physical CPU’s? Yoy can pay DOUBLE for your license, or I’m going to hobble your u-beaut SMP server down to single CPU again! Jeepers - even Microsoft weren’t that predatory! You could run SMP on 2 CPU for the same price as one!
And back to DG-UX - 20+ years ago (just after Y2K) I was running a project to migrate off an ancient AViiON (late 80’s model) to the last iteration of their RISC Motorola 88010 AViiONs, and was cutting ALL the users over (most of them were in test-labs running even older AViiONs as X-Terminals) when we realised, the default install of DG-UX has a 2 simultaneous user license! What? And it was like $100K to enable more than 2 users? WTF? Anyway - someone managed to scrounge up the license details on an ancient fax in some closet somewhere, and we got 32 users or something… DIABOLICAL!
1 Like
We had some version of SCO on a couple of AT(286) PC’s. It worked, but I can remember my offsider taking three months to get some C code to compile just to network it to CSIRONET.
That would have been THE first PC Unix I encountered - it predated FreeBSD by about 5 years. I dont recall any licence details, I think we just bought it in a box, like the way DOS used to come.
SCO OpenServer is basically Microsoft Xenix… Yeah - it ran on 8, then 16 bit computers too (e.g. 80286)… I used Linux and BSD a few years (~5) or so before I ever encountered SCO “Open” server (it was anything but, “open”)… a few things it inherited from those 640k loving curmugeons in Redmond Washington : 8 character hostname limitation, and having to reboot if you changed the IP address (seriousl!). I’m sure there are still probably POS and warehouse/parts stocktaking systems running using SCO openserver and Stallion paddle boards hooked up to ASCII terminals (Pizza Hut were probably SCO’s biggest customer I can think of).
Reminds me also of the days where your NIC could run Netbeui and/or IPX on some ISA NIC, e.g. you’re on a network of “hubbed” computers, or RG58 coax, with Novell Netware or Microsoft LAN manager - your client was free (I never ever experienced Token Ring - annoyed me you were kinda expected to understand token ring, WHY?). But that’s all very good and fine, but “Do you want TCP/IP” with that NIC? That will be $500 thank you very much! Utterly ridiculous… $500 to run TCP/IP on your $200 ISA NIC?
Microsoft’s TCP/IP Add on for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was “the killer app” - it was FREE!
Also I must apologise to the OP for the massive digression / tangent 
1 Like