[rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 68, Issue 12

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Andrew Jones <ascii.letter at gmail.com>
>Date: 2008/07/12 Sat PM 05:10:52 EDT
>To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>Subject: Re: [rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 68, Issue 12

<snip>

>In contrast, it was my understanding that SCO had made most of their 
>money through channel sales.  That is, I was led to believe they made 
>most of their money selling to VARs, who would make a huge margin on the 
>SCO UNIX sales.

SCO's big market was what I'll call "pseudo-embedded" applications, where lage, national chains would implement store automation solutions with a backroom server running SCO OpenServer OS, stores like "Burlington Coat Factory" (IIRC). I call these pseudo-embedded because the end-user *never* directly interacted with the underlying OS (like a kiosk, for example), but the application suite constantly changed. I tend to think of embedded applications as effectively "burned in ROM", but that's probably not really accurate...

For a while. after Radio Shack gave up on marketing their Tandy 2000[0] system they took their remaining inventory and deployed one to each store for store automation running Xenix, allowing them to avoid plowing unmarketable technology into the (literal) ground.[1]

Lionel

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_2000

[1] http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1999/1/1999_1_64.shtml