SCO UNIX System V on a 386SX

SCO UNIX System V/386 3.2, dual booted with MS-DOS 5.0, running on a i386SX PC with 4MB of RAM.
I just run some commands, which are present in GNU/Linux distros thanks to POSIX.
SCO UNIX takes 2 minutes to boot on this machine, so if you want to skip -- 2:07

[@locnar1701]

In the early 90s I was a HS student who was recruited for data entry and QA stuff for a software company that wrote and maintained public warehouse software. The system used Xenix at first, then ran on SCO 3.2.4 and SCO Openserver 5. The software ran on Microsoft FoxPro based on DBASE3. It was good time, and I have installed so many SCO machines in my life. I can still feel the texture of the license certificate for a 5 user license. I remember when SCO was available in the box at your local RadioShack which had computers on display. That was a fun time. Eventually we had to use FreeBSD and the SCO emulation layer as it was faster and way less expensive. My first work machine was a WYSE 60 in amber on a serial line.

[@ferrellsl]

The 90's were like the Wild, Wild, West for computing. There was always something new and exciting around the corner whether it was software or hardware. Now it seems that we're on the receiving end of a never ending series of marketing spin such as AI, blockchain and crypto currency. Not at all exciting like it was back in the day.

[@madmartigan1634]

That initial RAM check released a flood of GREAT memories of my childhood! I feel like I'm about to play King's Quest

[@chrfit1]

I remember having to maintain some specific quotation software on a SCO server at my work for years, it was oldest physical server we had, if a part died on the 386, there was a warehouse I would go to full of old parts specific to SCO setups. Our sales team connected to the server via telnet, by the time I managed to get a image of the drive the whole system was replaced by a single excel spreadsheet. As my first encounter with unix it was a pretty steep learning curve for me, but also pretty magical as well, compared to the MS Servers we were usually running.

[@judewestburner]

this is probably the most beautiful thing i've seen today

[@bettyswunghole3310]

I miss the days where you had to be a hybrid of Gandalf and Spock to operate computers!

[@BestSpatula]

I remember Linux on a 386 being quicker than this.

[@judewestburner]

I used to run some SCO Unix 5.something series servers installed on some pretty beefy HP NetServer hardware back in the early 2000's - running a VT220 EPOS application for about 350 users across the UK. It printed the sales orders / purchase orders / invoices etc to dot matrix printers before those were upgraded to laser using some clever software of which I don't recall the name. We switched the system to a Windows / SQL solution which I have to say was a good move - but it was really fun and somehow felt really official and grown up. Thank you for making this

[@BilalHeuser1]

My first install of Linux was Slackware on a 386DX40 and I learned how re-compile the kernel too!

[@anthonyjagers7770]

I always wanted to try Unix. I think I saw a price tag around 35 years ago and said, Oh No!

[@judewestburner]

So did Linus :)

[@octdavian]

You've brought a tear to my eye. You have the SCO Gold box with the tree on it with the 50 floppies?

[@woksrandomchannel]

What a long twisted tale surrounding SCO. I always wanted to try it. I never seen a real Unix up close.

[@TimotejFedlimid-zo3hy]

Anyone remember the absurd amount SCO Unix user manuals? Some were as thick as phone books.

[@dasmin1135]

An era when a web page on the internet was not yet available.

[@christopherneufelt8971]

Depends on the organization you was working. Some critical infrastructure facilities had a network where they had some billboard apps (don't imagine something like today: I speak about something like Man Pages) where the users could share some information (not email!) together with files. Was it fun? depends which you had on the other side. P.S. I am speaking about the period of 1982 til 1989.

[@bitwize]

I just got a 386 (that chinesium Pocket 386 thing). I totally want to try Unix, Minix, or a similar OS on it. Time to order a CF card...

[@simonvannarath]

I was tempted to buy a Pocket386 for that purpose myself; I have a disk set of Xenix 386 that I can try or Coherent 4.

[@francoisdastardly4405]

Nice !! 👍

[@РусланЗаурбеков-з6е]

Calculating square root with ancient bash, using AWK to compare numbers?? Now, I have seen everything.

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

I used the 80s standard Bourne shell but actually 80s 'sed' gave me the most pain 😂 It lacks most of the features of GNU sed and it uses the old POSIX regex format, so writing that simple expression, for removing the decimal part when the number is an int, was not easy 😅 Then I used 'awk' for comparison because sh (also modern Bash iirc) only supports integer comparison. BTW, It was fun writing the script on a real UNIX system: I think I'll upload it on GitHub 🙂 P.S. Now I recall writing it with the original 'vi': Oh boy the pain! 😁

[@cooktask]

Funny you should mention vi . I bumped into the video and while watching started thinking to myself "Imagine running vim on that?" well not vim but the original vi🤣

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

@@cooktask Yeah, I totally forgot to run it 🙃 In the end, it's the same as the default vi on Debian

[@H3liosphan]

Yeah as I was discovering ...nix on PCs I always wondered where 'pure' Unix was. Everybody seemed to be using Slackware Linux. Does this even have XWindows?

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

X came as an external package (in floppies) to install with sysadmsh

[@BestSpatula]

/dev/hd0d:/test -- this is extremely weird. Did it not actually mount DOS volumes? What is going on here?

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

Yeah, DOS commands to list and view files work without partition mount. Anyway, there's support for mounting DOS partition (required for editing files) but I was not able to make It work (It requires linking to the kernel, which always fails)

[@amtam05]

I immediately installed banner on my own system...

[@OltScript313]

What's your camera ?!

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

A Xiaomi phone 😁

[@tankermottind]

had a laugh when I installed ksh on Arch Linux and typed that sqrt script into vim...and it ran! (it doesn't run with bash)

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

I tried the same script on Debian 12 (Bash 5.2.15) and it worked. I just had 2 problems: 1. Modern awk sets the decimal separator based on the locale (so comma for me, as I'm italian). Had to add 'export LC_ALL="C"' to fix this 2. The "compare" if gave 'Illegal number' errors when comparing with an empty string, but this actually didn't stop the script from returning the correct sqrt value. To get rid of error messages, we can just replace '-eq' with '='. I think old Bourne shell just didn't print errors when comparing a number with a non number string. Could it be that you didn't add the she-bang when writing the script? (#!/bin/sh is present in the Unix script, it just got cut out by the screen size 😁)

[@tankermottind]

@@mrdosretrocomputing I installed ksh and used #!/bin/ksh in the shebang since ksh was the default shell on the SCO system and it worked exactly as expected, when I changed it to #!/bin/bash it gave some kind of error, I don't quite remember. Maybe it did actually return a result but I was mostly paying attention to those errors. Also it's just *hilarious* how long that 386 takes to return a result. Maybe if it had an 80387 coprocessor it would be a bit faster?

[@mrdosretrocomputing]

​@@tankermottindthink so, it's doing floating point math in the end

[@miasma82]

I use unix btw

[@davidlloyd1526]

Hard to believe that Linux smoked this amazing OS. Gotta be something illegal IBM did.

[@Astinsan]

It was slow on a Pentium

[@manuell3505]

This is illegal now, right? 😁