They just didn't know it.

Yes, I loved the multi-port various boards/ cluster Port combos. I gave my boss a long lecture on the utility of allowing a hundred people on a single 386 because each keystroke was not interrupting the main CPU. I can have a very large Oracle back end and be doing other stuff simultaneously and we can all work happily as long as he bought those damn boards. I have gone through many iterations of those boards before we moved on to non-rs-232 communications in my world for the most part.

I've worked on pretty much every Digi and mega and any other insane blinky light box in the 1985 time frame.

I also coded ioctl device drivers for them in C and assembler, and associated printers, terminals and modems (I can whistle an escape) because it was my job to support a third party printer subsystem called XPD and terminal program called Teleterm. I then had to port the printer subsystem to the NCR Tower when it came out. Those ioctls were not the same.

When dealing with the printer subsystem that meant I had to fake both Berkeley and AT&t and be better which wasn't tough in those days, I didn't write it originally but I was hired to support it and then it was my job to port it other Unix systems.

I had just learned the C language in the last 4 months when they started allowing me to actually touch their code. They were idiots.

I think the bottom line was when I had already proved out the Linux running Oracle. It wasn't supported yet, but if you were willing to take a chance you could run it. So I had a dozen or so multiprocessor sco Unix boxes running in my data warehousing systems room and one Linux box. Just checking it out.

I'd been using Linux for utility boxes for about 3 or 4 years at that point but it took a lot to say we were going to use it for the database back end.

At that moment sco had the 2 GB file limitation so I had to do all kinds of juggling to deal with that. Veritas helped but it still sucked. I had 80 GB files I had to deal with. I had 100 GB Oracle table spaces I had to deal with. And every single one of them had to be constructed out of 2 GB segments. It was insane.

So I went to the sun boxes at that point. But I still had the sco boxes. So I had a bunch of ultra 450s and a couple of 3500s and a few racks of discs and a whole bunch of sco boxes and sco called me up to renew support.

Linux had blown past the 2 GB file limit at that point. They had third party support. Oracle said. Sure, give it a shot.

I told that guy I was going to turn off every sco box in the room, I had already moved every bit of functionality to either low end sun or Linux boxes, and my cluster of Linux boxes is kicking ass right now. I will never buy sco again and I will never recommend them. I hope they go down in flames.

They were in the middle of the lawsuits as well.