I read a Slashdot post today that pointed to an AP article on Michael Dell returning as CEO at Dell, replacing his previously hand-picked crony Kevin Rollins due to lots of downside to the dell business.  The article had this interesting quip:

…in recent years Dell has been stung by a glut of low-cost, low-profit PCs and weaker-than-anticipated sales of pricier, more lucrative desktops and notebooks.

I found this amusing, to say the least.  I distinctly remember standing at an all-hands engineering staff meeting at Dell back sometime between 1989 and 1991 where Mr. Dell stood up and told us how we were out to make computers commodity items in order to take the market lead from big, bad Compaq. 

Careful what you wish for, Delly-boy.

After reading the story I thought about past articles related to Dell (the company) either going whole-hog into the linux realm or backing out like a frightened mouse.  These stories also make me laugh.  What so few people know is how close Dell came to owning the desktop Unix/Linux market back in 1990-1991.  And how Dell (the moron) stood hand-in-pocket with Gates and Company to squash the effort.  You see, Dell had it's own Unix group back then.  For a dual processor system.  Way back in 1990.  Didn't know that, did you?

The hardware ran into problems and was delayed, all the while Dell (the company) looked for ways to cut costs to get those ever popular dreams of commodity computers out of their heads and onto the market.  At the time, Dell engineering was lead by CTO Glenn Henry, now better known as the founder of Via subsidiary Centaur Technology, the guys who makes those chips that go on all those mini/nano/pico-ITX boards.   While I was never privy to the reasons the dual-processor box didn't work (maybe 486 technology just didn't work for that type of design, though I don't even know if 486's were being used on the project), I do know that Henry brought in a friend/acquaintance/guy he'd heard of from IBM name Ken Witte to do a port of USL System V R4 (aka Unix SVR4) for the dual processor box.  Around Ken he built a team of developers and some support and test engineers, myself included.  The SVR4 release was one of the first to include automatic device detection and driver loading (thanks Randy for reminding me about that).  Prior to the SVR4 port, the Dell Unix Group produced a Dell Unix SVR3.2 release (based on the popular ISC Unix) to extensive acclaim in the industry (unfortunately it was so long ago I can't find but one reference to it on the net) – yet to little notice within Dell.  (For a detailed history of Dell Unix, see Charlie Bauer's excellent blog article.)

You see, Dell (the company) didn't know how to sell or support anything but Microsoft Windows 3.1 (or was it 3.2).  They lived, ate, and breathed that crap.  But USL didn't know how to price for PCs and Dell didn't want to teach them.  And neither did Microsoft. 

So, as many projects do in this industry, Dell Unix came to an end.  It just so happened that it also came to an end as Dell (the company, or maybe the moron) fired, booted or forced out about 200 engineers in the summer of 1991.  The timing is irrelevant – the company was in bad shape and Dell (the moron) didn't want anyone to know he was having a layoff so if you spelled your name wrong on a form it was grounds for being put on probation, from which no one was ever taken off (you went straight to the scrap pile after probation was over).  Anyway, the Dell Unix guys saw this coming and tried to spin-off our own company.  We offered to custom install Unix for any customer of Dell at no charge to Dell.  We offered to pick up support of Dell's existing Unix customer base (of which included NASA's simulators in Houston at the time).  We needed to purchase the license for SVR4 from Dell in order to do all this.  And this should not come to anyone's suprise who's been following Dell's wallowing in pretend-support-of-those-things-not-Windows, Dell (the company and the moron) refused to sell it to us.

Now I have no proof of the matter, but it seems obvious there was no reason NOT to sell us the license unless someone thought it would affect their business.  Not Dell's – we'd be supporting existing customers and offering to continue to bring in those Unix customers who otherwise wouldn't be using Dell hardware.  More hardware sales, if if only a little, can't be a bad thing if it doesn't cost you anything.  Not USL.  They were happy as clams to think they were moving into the desktop market, even if they didn't know how to work within that market.  So who would have had a reason not to want us to have that source code?

I'll give you one guess, and you may not even need that one.

So as you continue to read about the potential decline of the Dell-Microsoft fondling parties, don't be too sure it's over.  It wasn't over in 1991.  It aint over now.  It aint ever gonna be over as long as Dell and Balmer (or Gates) continue their unholy alliance.  Dell (the company), like Microsoft (the essence of evil), has delusions of owning the market.  They just don't realize – neither of them – that the market doesn't want to be owned.  It wants to be free.

Like Linux.

Update: 2008-01-11

Charlie Sauer wrote up the history of Dell Unix.  I've linked to it within the article here as well.