SCO Unix OpenServer 5 install on the Siemens

In this part we're going to be installing SCO Unix on the machine. We're going to be doing some upgrades to the machine, including a CDROM drive and a new hard drive, and see if we can prepare this machine for SCO Unix.

A third and final video will include setting up networking and seeing if we can recuperate some of the data that was on the original hard drive.

Chapters :

0:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Quick overview
02:25 - Finding an ISO file
04:57 - Installation process
07:25 - First boot
08:54 - The video card
10:32 - The desktop
13:38 - The SCSI setup
16:54 - Outro

#SCO #Unix #Siemens

[geovanesantos]

Hi, I worked with SCO UNIX in 2007 here in Marabá, Brazil, TOPPPP

[amirpourghoureiyan]

It's great to see an old workstation restored and running a non Microsoft OS, that SCO desktop really looks nice for the time!

[lelandclayton]

SCO was always a PITA. It's a 300MB ISO but all of the packages have to inflate into RAM Disk then copy to the Hard Drive and then verify it's contents then deletes the RAM Disk. Does this for every package and that is why it took forever.

Winworld, don't get me started. I use to be a Mod in the forums and everything went down hill when a change of hands happened.

[wysoft]

My only exposure to SCO Unix was at the local library. It was how I first got on the internet in the early 90s.

You applied for a user account with your library card, and in turn got a login that you could use at a bank of Wyse amber screen terminals. There was a neat little text menu system with access to all of the typical early 90s internet tools - usenet, gopher, email, etc. and even limited shell access - I remember the quota being something really low because you would hit it really fast just saving text files to your home dir. There was no way to write anything to floppy to take home either which sucked, but I had BBSes for that.

I remember my E-mail address was insanely long as the library server was nested behind a bunch of different subdomains. You could also dial in to the system from home and access it that way - the library even later on offered very, very basic dialup internet service, but I remember it being insanely slow. I was about 10 at the time and already knew DOS pretty well, and started learning Unix a bit that way. Within a few years I had dialup at home, installed RedHat Linux (remember the thick book and CD combo sold at Costco) and had no use for the library system.

I read some truly horrific stuff on usenet sitting in front of that Wyse terminal, stuff that no ten year old should have been reading, and enjoyed every second of it. Nobody was watching over your shoulder or keeping track of what you were doing - at least as far as I know.

I don't think I ever encountered SCO Unix anywhere else, but it was my first gateway to the internet and Unix as a whole.

[tinfoilcat]

Woho! Good job! Being a Linux user since the early 00's I remember SCO as a kind of Voldemort like entity. :) Nowadays it's just good fun to see older *NIX systems. My oldest UNIX book is from 1983. <3

[Leahi]

Man, that SCO Unix OS looks awesome. Would love to try that. Can't wait to see an exploration of the OS.

[Edman_]

I'm 42 yo and this was the first time ever I saw any kind of UNIX in operation. Up until now it was just a word to me. Thanks :)

[charlesdorval]

Looks quite nice, I expected something more... "industrial"
lol that has to be the best CD mounting icon

[MarkyShaw]

Beautiful look at this old server! Man you would have been rolling in the dough installing a system like SCO back in the day. I used to help support a local municipality that used financial software that ran on OpenServer. It was a rock solid system and ran for 12 years before being discontinued. Couple diehards still out there though that make some good money helping companies virtualize these old boxes! Thanks for sharing man.

[osgrov]

Oh yeah, this is my jam.. Vintage Unix, and on such a beautiful machine too! Big fan of how that Siemens looks.
I'd love to see you continue working on it. Get networking up and running, try the internet and such. :)
Great video, two thumbs up.

[doalwa]

I have hazy memories of a few customers running OpenServer as a terminal server for a little known ERP application called „Parity“ if I remember correctly. It was accessed by Telnet or SSH from regular windows boxes and provided an MS-DOS like GUI....those were the days 😁 This is the first time I’ve ever seen the graphical Desktop environment of OpenServer, very interesting mix of CDE with a little bit of Mac/Windows thrown into it!

[PWingert]

When I was working for the Ministry of housing back in the late 1980's we had an upgrade of a server. This server tracked all the hazardous waste spill responses for the province of Ontario. It ran a custom application for this purpose. The upgrade involved a $20, 000 server a copy of the Informix database and SCO open server along with the custom application. It was used by the department staff of six. It was quite a large database. It was replacing an old server that was at least ten years old and was clunky and prone to hardware failures. It was so old that the hard drive sounded like a howitzer every time the heads moved! Knowing our government, they are still using the same server even today! When I was at the ministry of housing we ran the entire housing allocation system for affordable housing on an ancient system that utilized two-foot wide and 8-inch high disc packs. When I was there they told me it had been running since 1976 and this was in 1985. They were just starting to re-write it for the mainframe on an IBM 370/VM platform using a database system called model 305 I think. It a very BASIC like language and very easy to work in. But not much of transferrable job skill.

[RetroTechChris]

That is one nice UI there! Wow! Great video as always. And, the setup method is perfect... start with and test the peripherals, get a good install, and then install them into the system!

[stonent]

The icons rotated at an angle reminds me of the Indigo Magic desktop on the Sgi systems. Only thing missing is the zoom wheel on the window to shrink and grow the icons.

[LadislavAlexa]

It's great to see this piece of history running again. Thanks a lot for the video! :)

[TheOriginalCollectorA]

I like how the desktop has a World Wide Web icon.

[DolganoFF]

I'm impressed the video card was detected automatically!

[foca]

One of my first jobs the company have a box running SCO Openserver.
They didn't know exactly what the box was running but we still have to login on it and run a batch job every night. The box was notorious for not booting and need many tries to restart it.
Almost one year later after they needed to move some servers to another datacenter we tried to discover what the server was running.
Them we discovered he was running the ERP from a company my company bought some years ago and before everything was integrated into SAP the batch process was necessary to move data from one system to another but this wasn't the case for many years but nobody asked it before.
And this wasn't the only server we have no clue what was running one old IBM AS/400 and one IBM P series blade was in production and only after a archeological research we discovered that one server was running Lotus Notes and the other a DB2 database used by a company we bought in the early 2000s.
When I started to work there, there's a HP Superdome that a company we recently bought used. We have no use for it but the network admin was adamant that the server was useful. After six months we couldn't find any use for it, but at least I could work with HP-UX just for the lolz.

[rberlim]

Sorry, it really sound funny to me how you say SCO as a word :) I worked with it in 2002~2004 and we called it S.C.O. They where a pain in the ass to instal, and we had a manual for each specific hardare we had to install it. Thanks for the great work man, love the channel!

[DevilishDesign]

Excellent video as usual. The user interface reminds me very much of Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system (Based on UNIX System V)