Just seeing that boot screen brings back memories. I must have installed XENIX more than a hundred times during my 6 years at SCO. It's too bad that Microsoft bribed them out of existence - we had developed a full office suite when Microsoft realized that we would be a real competitor. So Bill essentially guaranteed us a monopoly in exchange for killing the office suite. (Modern monopolies are "effective monopolies", created by product differentiation. So killing selective features in Windows can allow a competitor to create an "effective monopoly" over a market segment. Since the legal definition of monopoly is so antiquated, as consumers we are surrounded by effective monopolies which should be illegal - but aren't.)
So there was a full office suite that ran under XENIX? Was it ever released? Character mode, graphics mode? Did it have printer drivers? Do you remember the name? I'm fascinated by the idea of an unreleased piece of work that significant.
We developed it and sold it initially to the government - using that revenue to make it stable. It was Lyrix word processor and a spreadsheet and graphics program (the graphics program was pretty bad, but the spreadsheet had gone through a few major revisions and was getting competetitive with Lotus 123 (the major spreadsheet at the time.) So sure we had printer drivers and WYSIWIG, kind of like WordPerfect which was the major competitor at the time. Microsoft was still trying to assemble all the pieces of an Office Suite and get users from MSDOS to Windows. After meeting with Bill, and promises to break Windows networking so that UNIX could have the TCP/IP-based back-office business, we killed it. (So people who can't figure out why networking was broken for so long in Apple and Windows products just don't know the trades which were made.)
Apple had installed the entire networking code from UNIX under appletalk. But Steve personally fired the head of Apple networking. Then he fired the next engineering manager too, until he got one who wouldn't keep trying to expose the full tcp/ip capability that they had built into the Apple kernel. So the initial capability was appletalk with low cost chips, but their tech guys quickly realized that they needed more. There is a lot of unpublished history - a lot of it completely illegal in order to build the fortunes of the tech leaders (and not just Apple, Microsoft, and SCO.)
A few years ago I was in love with Xenix, and I managed to track down a fairly sizable collection of software that was not openly available, including the Developement system.
Some of these did not have any working serial/key pair, so a friend wrote a k&r c program that printed a sh file that ran brand with every activation key for a given serial... Took a couple of minutes in a virtual machine to find the correct one, but it never felt like a neat solution.
Then in 2017 I found this post... And the neat solution I was looking for.
it’s probably that 30-year old copy protection is relatively easy to break using tools and computing power that did not exist 30 years ago
Even 30 years ago this would not have been strong at all. With 3 lowercase letters the keyspace is effectively 26^3 or 17576. Add digits and it's still just 36^3 = 46656. That's tiny. I suspect it wasn't made larger partly due to the crypto export regulations, and the fact that "big company" software like this mainly used protection schemes to keep honest users honest. The shareware/trialware of the time had far more devious techniques.
