On Wed, Aug 07, 2024 at 06:25:12PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>
> Relevant to Clem's point, it seems like the iBCS
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Binary_Compatibility_Standard served to
> try and provide some uniformity for ISVs providing binary software on a
> variety of x86 UNIX.  The bit it says about Linux having support is true
> too, I have some old boxed Linux distros and that is one of the features
> they advertise.

Around 1994, MIT purchased a site license for a proprietary
spreadsheet program for SCO because we knew it would work on Linux
(and we had a lot of Linux usage on campus; we had ported a good chunk
of the Project Athena infrastruture, including the Andrew File System
to Linux).

An amusing anecdote; I worked with one of their primary software
developers so we could get a custom build of the software that would
only work if the IP address of the machine was 18.X.Y.Z, since MIT had
class A network.  This person would eventually become one of the
founders of Red Hat, and I told him that we were purchasing it
intended to run it on Linux.  He told me that this would be perfectly
fine, because he had compiled the iBCS binary on Linux.  Turns out the
development environment on Linux was far more developer friendly (at
least in his eyes) than SCO, so he was building a SCO/iBCS binary on
Linux.  Since he had done his basic automated regression testing on
Linux with iBCS emulation, and only later sent the binary to do QA on
the SCO client, he was quite confident that it work just _fine_ on our
student's Linux desktops.

                                   - Ted