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(The SCO Group, Lindon, UT, www.sco.com) A leading vendor of Unix operating systems for the x86 platform. SCO had also offered Linux, but abandoned the line in the spring of 2003. The SCO Group is the combination of two companies: Utah-based Caldera, Inc. and Santa-Cruz-based The Santa Cruz Operation.

     Caldera was a software company founded in 1994 by Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks. Its primary products were the OpenLinux and DR-DOS operating systems (see DR-DOS). In 2001, Caldera acquired the products and people from The Santa Cruz Operation, widely known as SCO, and a year later changed the company name to The SCO Group.

     The Santa Cruz Operation was founded in 1979 as a custom programming house. In 1984, it introduced SCO XENIX, its first operating system, which ran on the Apple Lisa, PC XT and the DEC Pro 350. It later developed only for the Intel platform, and more than two million licenses of its Unix client and server products were sold. In 1995, SCO purchased UnixWare and all the AT&T source code for Unix System V from Novell. It merged UnixWare and its OpenServer product into a single operating system, which was released in 1998 as SCO UnixWare 7.