I spent nearly three and a half years working on technical documentation for a UNIX vendor during the early 90s. Along the way, I learned Perl (against orders), accidentally provoked the invention of the robots.txt file, was the token Departmental Hippie, and finally jumped ship when the company ran aground on the jagged rocky reefs of the Dilbert Continent. At one time, that particular company was an extremely cool place to work. But today, it lingers on in popular memories only because of the hideous legacy of it's initials ... SCO.

SCO was not then the brain-eating zombie of the UNIX world, odd though this may seem to young 'uns who've grown up with Linux. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, SCO (then known more commonly as the Santa Cruz Operation) was a real UNIX company. Started by a father-son team, Larry and Doug Michels, SCO initially did UNIX device driver work. Then, around 1985, Microsoft made a huge mistake. Back in those days, MS developed code for multiple operating systems. Some time before then, they'd acquired the rights to Xenix, a fork of AT&T UNIX Version 7. SCO did most of the heavy lifting on porting Xenix to new platforms; and so, when Microsoft decided Xenix wasn't central to their business any more, SCO bought the rights (in return for a minority shareholding).

By late 1991, when I joined SCO, SCO wasn't just about Xenix. They had their own official UNIX SVR3 port, SCO UNIX, and (with X11 and a Motif-based GUI on top, and various other gadgets) this formed the core of a fairly neat desktop workstation environment, SCO Open Desktop. SCO back then was about 1200 people, with development centres in Santa Cruz (focussing on X11 and desktop integration), Toronto (the compiler team) and Watford, just outside London (where the UNIX kernel and command line utilities were maintained). It was, in short, a thriving software multinational with a somewhat Californian culture. There was, for example, a dress code: "clothing must be worn during office hours," which was imposed in the wake of an incident when it wasn't (which unfortunately coincided with an on-site visit by some major investors).

(If you are scratching your head and wondering why this doesn't sound much like the SCO Group that is the object of so much hatred these days, that's because it's not the same company. SCO Group started out as Caldera Systems, a Utah-based Linux startup bankrolled by Ray Noorda in the late 90s. They bought the name, trademarks, and — they thought — the UNIX intellectual property assets from the Santa Cruz Operation in 2001. The original SCO renamed itself "Tarantella Inc" and went away to do, well, Tarantella-ish things before being absorbed by Sun, and then Oracle. The SCO Group then went on to play merry hell with the Linux community and take a copious metaphorical shit all over my resumé. That's life in silly valley, I guess.)

When I answered the job ad for technical author, I didn't have much idea of what I was getting into. I'd bluffed my way into Real World Graphics, figured out what I was doing on the fly, and carved out a niche — but RWG was small, so small that I'd never worked with another tech author. SCO, in contrast, had an entire freaking department. In fact it had three departments, with about thirty folks in Santa Cruz, fifteen in Watford, and five in Toronto. If that sounds like a lot, well, SCO's techpubs operation was writing, maintaining, and pushing out something like thirty thousand pages of documentation on an eighteen month production cycle. By trade publishing standards they were over-staffed, but trade publishers don't generally employ their own authors in-house. About half the techpubs crew were editors or typesetters; and about half of us were writers.

"We'd like you to do an aptitude test," said Bridget, the department head, when she interviewed me. "Here's a notepad. I'd like you to take a stab at writing a house style guide for a techpubs department. You've got half an hour."

I eyeballed the Wyse terminal in the office behind her. "I thought you said you had Microsoft Word running on that?" I asked. "My handwriting's not very good ... mind if I use it?"

Bridget gave me a very strange look: it was to be the first of many. (Later, she told me that of all the candidates she'd interviewed for tech writing jobs, I was the only one who'd asked to use a word processor.)

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I didn't fit in too well at SCO; it was just my good luck that SCO suffered from acute multiple personality disorder and had plenty of room for the barkingly eccentric, as long as they could get the job done. SCO had arrived in the UK in the late 1980s, acquiring the UNIX division of a large British software house who really didn't understand this hippyish Californian stuff. A number of Californians had come over with the new company, and there'd been some cross-fertilization. The result: a company where some folks wore suits, some folks wore flip-flops and torn jeans, and the only common denominator was that everyone obeyed the dress code. The parent company was keen on training courses (we had an internal training division, and a budget), and team building exercises. A team building exercise in Santa Cruz meant something like midnight drumming on the beach; in Watford it was code for a lunchtime trip to the pub.

Technology wise ... you probably aren't interested so I'll keep it brief: we ate our own dogfood. When I joined the EMEA techpubs unit, we had sixteen green screen terminals hanging off a single 33MHz 386 PC running SCO UNIX, and we were editing our doc set in vi with a bastardized, weird set of troff macros for markup and sccs for version control. When I left, some years later, I abandoned a nice 486 workstation with a 17" monitor, running Open Deathtrap — sorry, Open Desktop — but still editing files with the same weird macros (apart from the odd foray into Framemaker for dealing with documents from our newly acquired subsidiary in Cambridge, IXI).

At SCO, I admit I went a bit wild. I got into a four month burn-out cycle; because I was doing a job I understood, in a comfortable environment, but within a bizarrely corporate administrative structure. About six months after I arrived, I went through the first downsizing of the 1990s — a cross-industry initiative to set up a rival platform to IBM and Microsoft crashed and burned, and SCO took a 10% headcount reduction in the course of recovering from the mess. We then lurched into developing a new product, SCO OpenServer. OpenServer was to be the all-singing all-dancing successor to Open Desktop; a desktop workstation environment with support for a whole barn-full of then-sexy UNIX technologies — diskless workstation installs (a 500Mb hard disk cost about £500 back then), remote administration via a scripted GUI environment written in a high level language (Tcl) using a graphics server that could cope with both X11 and CURSES displays, and I forget what else. The OpenServer development program turned out to be a bear. Originally scheduled to take 15 months, it succumbed to specification creep; by the time I left, three years later, it had just gone golden master and was about to ship. From the techpubs point of view, we were documenting a complex operating system product — it ran to about 8 million lines of code, on the same order as Windows NT 4.0, against which it would compete (badly) in the server market — and for the first time it would come with a revolutionary hypertext environment to display the documentation — a program called NCSA Mosaic.

The trouble with the mission creep from my point of view was that Parkinson's Law applies; work expands to fill the time available for its completion. A lot of the processes within SCO's techpubs environment were incredibly inefficient. But on the other hand, SCO was getting into the whole ISO 9000 quality assurance fandango. Consequently, everything got re-written, revised, edited, and chewed over sixteen bazillion times, and everyone got to try on a variety of ornamental and not particularly useful headgear. During this process I discovered several things about myself. I do not respond well to micro-managing. I especially do not respond well to being micro-managed on a highly technical task by a journalism graduate. Also, I'm a lousy proofreader. Did I say lousy? I meant lousy. Santa Cruz does indeed have a nice beach for late evening walks with your girlfriend. Oh, and: vi not emacs.

Around the early 90s, one of the perennial headaches in SCO's techpubs department received a permanent solution. The problem was this: how to simultaneously manage (a) an online help system and (b) printed paper manuals? Especially as paper is going away, because the cost of printing the documentation set on dead tree added about £40 to the cost of goods of a copy of SCO UNIX or Open Deathtrap — which is to say, took £40 per sale off the profit margin.

The solution we came up with was called HTML, a fun little SGML-derived markup language that ran on a client server platform called, ambitiously, the World Wide Web. In late 1992 or early 1993, SCO techpubs collectively went WWW-crazy. (That's why we ended up with the personal workstations; to run a web browser.) Our weird troff macro set was designed to support a future upgrade to SGML document management; now our coders purched into action with a bizarre mixture of awk and ksh scripts to chow down on troff and spit out HTML. Masses of HTML. Mountains of HTML. When OpenServer shipped there were something like a quarter of a million HTML links in the documentation tree. It took a server something like eleven hours to chew down on the troff source and spit it all out. But from mid-1993 on we were committed to the web. And reading the web at work.

Did I say "reading the web"? The web was kind of small in those days. There was a daily mailing list called, if I remember correctly, "what's new on the web". It listed every new website that had shown up, and I mean every new website. I used to read it with my morning coffee, visiting those that interested me; I'd usually finished by 10am. (It finally grew too big to follow by late 1994, and was abandoned some time in 1995.)

I confess, the web fascinated me. And I was getting increasingly bored and fractious with my job over those years. I wanted to code; but I'd talked myself into a comfortable, well-paid niche in which I was pretty much paid not to code. Or write fiction. (Almost without noticing, I'd tailed off to about two or three short stories a year, plus half a dozen articles for Computer Shopper.)

During one of my periods of burn-out I decided to teach myself Perl. So I started by trying to write a web spider — a bot that did a depth-first traversal of the web, to retreive (and eventually index) what it found, or just to download pages (a la wget or curl). There weren't many resources for robot writers back then; the internet in the UK was pretty embryonic, too. (SCO EMEA had a 64K leased line in those days, shared between 200 people.) I was testing my spider and, absent-mindedly, gave it a wired-in starting URL. What I didn't realize was that I'd picked a bloody stupid place to start my test traversals from; a website on spiders, run from a server owned by a very small company — over a 14.4K leased line. I guess I'd unintentionally invented the denial of service attack! Martin, the guy who ran the web server, got in touch, and was most displeased. First, he told me to stop hammering his system — advice with which I hastily complied. Then he invented a standard procedure: when visiting a new system, look for a file called "robots.txt", parse it, and avoid any directories or files it lists. I think I may have written the first spider to obey the robots.txt protocol; I'm certainly the numpty who necessitated its invention. (You can find the evidence here (look for websnarf).)

All good times come to an end.

In early 1995 I'd been doing some work on the side; both writing for Computer Shopper, and the beginnings of a web book for Addison-Wesley ... and also some perl programming for a guy from Edinburgh who was providing web technical support for Demon Internet. SCO was clearly in a tight spot, two years overdue on OpenServer, and I was getting a bit itchy around the soles of my feet; I could see the public internet and the web coming, and knew they were going to be huge.

One morning, our managers did a walkthrough of the cubicle hive, taking down all the Dilbert print-outs stapled to the beige fabric walls, and telling everybody to be ready for a magical mystery tour, leaving from the central courtyard at 1pm. I knew the signs; executives from head office are apparently subject to mysterious taboos, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to gaze upon the work of Scott Adams lest it bring bad luck to the department. And the magical mystery tour ... there was going to be some kind of big announcement. And it had to be big — we were in functional freeze and the mad dash to the final release candidate for the product that was more than two years overdue and which would make or break the company, with over five hundred Severity One bugs to fix! So what could possibly justify dragging the entire development group, and QA, and techpubs, and marketing, and sales, and admin, to an offsite for half a day? I didn't know, but I spent the rest of that morning updating my CV — just in case.

Now, I have learned, over the years, to be alert for Bad Signs when evaluating a company's health. Here is an example of a Bad Sign:

They bus everyone to an offsite meeting in a conference centre, hand out cups of grape juice, usher you into a theatre, dim the lights ... then the sound system comes up, playing Things Can Only Get Better as the board of directors run on-stage in their grey suits, punching the air and giving each other high-fives, to announce that:

a) The Chief Executive is retiring, and

b) His successor is the current Chief Financial Officer, and

c) Said CFO promises to grow the company revenues by 500% in 5 years

This was a company in the UNIX on PC sector at a critical time in its development. Linux was coming up on our radar with increasing frequency. The internet was not merely visible, but becoming a vital tool without which our internal processes wouldn't work, and public adoption was growing at something like a compound 50% per month — but the high-level management response was to emit a fart of a product, a neutered "personal" build of Open Desktop with a voucher for 10% off the cost of a leased line from UUNet or Pipex, priced at about the cost of a decent second-hand car.

Do I need to explain why putting an accountant in charge of a technology-driven company is not necessarily a wise, visionary, and forward-looking move?

At this point I considered myself to be on notice. But I was fat and happy at SCO, earning more than I'd ever earned before; it wasn't until another month had passed that I realized just how bad the situation was about to become.

As a Californian software corporation, SCO was prone to various types of American management disease; no alcohol on corporate premises, for example: and then the annual recurring Maoist self-criticism and re-education ritual known as the performance appraisal.

Maybe I'm being unjustly critical here; maybe my line manager (not Bridget) had grounds for her criticisms in 1995. Certainly I wasn't a team player — but then, the way I was working at that point was typically as a trouble-shooter, going in and fixing the more technical stuff that some of our other tech authors just didn't understand. Be that as it may, after one particularly bruising session I headed back down to the department under something of a cloud, following my manager. She departed, en route to a meeting; my course back to my cubicle went past her desk. I saw a blue hardback on the desk. "That's funny," I thought, "it's not like her to be reading a novel at work. It's probably something relating to management theory. Hmm."

I nosily flipped open the book and read the flyleaf. Did a short, sharp intake of breath. Closed the book carefully, marched back to my desk, picked up my phone, and dialed a number in Edinburgh.

"Fearghas. That job you were talking about ..."

"Yes? We're kind of tight right now."

"Um, I really need it."

"Are you sure? We've got enough money in the bank to pay for just one month. This is a start-up. I can't make any promises."

"Fearghas, I need a new job."

"Okay. When can you get up here?"

Here is an example of a Terminally Bad Sign for any organization in the computer business:

... When you discover that your line manager's recreational reading is the 1980 edition of the IBM Staff Handbook.

This may not make much sense to you if you're from the outside of the computer biz, but let's put it this way: IBM was the company that grew fat and happy catering to folks like those at Imperial Merchandise. Here's a transcript of an interview with an ex-IBMer from that period. Note how very corporate the corporate culture is. Note also that in 1993 IBM's traditional culture crashed and burned, running up what was then the biggest loss in American corporate history as they finally lost control of the PC business to Microsoft. If you see your managers taking helpful hints from the corporate equivalent of the Titanic on a speed-run through the ice-infested waters of the North Atlantic, it is clearly time to leave: and so I gave notice, packed my bags, drove up to Edinburgh, and enlisted in my second start-up death march ....

