HCR Corporation

~ the goodbye ~

Human Computing Resources was started in 1976 by a group of computer scientists at and around the University of Toronto, with offices on St. Mary Street just off Yonge. The president was Ronald Baecker, an associate professor in the computer science and electrical engineering department who would become one of the significant figures in human-computer interaction. Two of his students were co-founders: Michael Tilson, who was among the first people in Canada to take Unix seriously, and David Tilbrook, who had built an interactive pagination system called NewsWhole for The Globe and Mail. Two other Baecker students, Rob Pike and Tom Duff, went on to be famous in the same field without ever working there.

The first years were consulting and contract programming, with IBM as an early customer, plus an attempt to sell NewsWhole to newspapers. Editors came to the demonstrations and liked what they saw, and then declined to run their production on software from a tiny unproven firm. NewsWhole was dropped in 1979. Tilson summarized the lesson in a 1986 interview: "The company quickly discovered that the software industry was not a bed of roses."

The same year they gave up on newspapers, they bought a license from Western Electric to resell Unix, and that decision is the whole company. By one count they were the second firm anywhere to support Unix commercially. What they sold was expertise: if you had designed a processor and needed Unix running on it before your competitors shipped, you called Toronto. They did the PDP-11 and the VAX, the Motorola 68000, the Intel 8086, the Zilog Z8000, the PERQ workstation and the National Semiconductor NS16032, which Tilson wrote up as a seven-page case study in Byte. In 1983 InfoWorld said HCR "probably has more experience porting UNIX to different architectures than anyone else."

~ the chronicle ~

~ unity ~

Their own Unix was called Unity, built on System III, sold standalone for DEC minicomputers and on an OEM basis for other architectures. One version of it ran on top of VAX/VMS, translating file paths so that you could use Unix utilities from inside the operating system Unix was supposed to be replacing. Around it sat a Pascal compiler, a BASIC interpreter, cross compilers, an RT-11 emulator and a configurable menu shell that ran on top of the Bourne shell for people who found the Bourne shell unfriendly. In 1982 Microsoft and SCO brought HCR into the Xenix work and handed it the right to do Xenix ports and license Xenix binaries in Canada. That is how a Toronto firm came to write parts of Microsoft's Unix. By some accounts HCR had to take over the initial port of AT&T's Version 7 after Microsoft could not finish it.

Their customer list was Control Data, NCR, Prime Computer, National Semiconductor: companies that bought an operating system the way you buy a bearing. No retail box was ever printed and no consumer price was ever set, because nothing here was for sale to a person. Everybody who ever used HCR's work used it on a machine with somebody else's badge on the front and never saw the name. Nothing here was ever something a household in Turkey could have bought or even heard of.

~ chariot ~

In February 1984 Baecker stepped down as president and went back to his faculty work, staying on as chairman. Dennis Kukulsky, previously a national sales manager at Tektronix, took the job. The strategy changed to business applications, which was part of what had attracted the venture money. A suite called Chronicle shipped in 1985 with the usual accounting modules in it, and behind that came Chariot, a $7,500 development system that bundled those modules with a 4GL-style application generator and was pitched at value-added resellers. Around 1,500 of them signed up or expressed interest. Delivery was promised for February 1986 and did not happen, and the company had no real way to market the thing even if it had been finished. An executive told the Financial Post that "pricing is a black art."

Kukulsky resigned in July 1986 and Tilson took the president's chair. The business products were divested and staff were cut, and the company went back to system software and the people who write it. It worked: HCR turned about $100,000 in earnings on $4 million of revenue. By 1987 the name on the door had been shortened to HCR Corporation and the office had moved to Bloor Street in Yorkville, with five venture investors holding seventy percent of the shares. Baecker, teaching a course on software as a business in 2001, was harder on both eras than any journalist had been, describing his own as "the academic, the visionary ... go everywhere, which is to have no focus and to go nowhere."

~ may 7, 1990 ~

The late years were the good ones. HCR built C compilers for the ETA10 supercomputer and for Intel's iWarp, shipped a C++ compiler on top of AT&T's Cfront while C++ was still being standardized, and in 1990 announced SuperTest with the Dutch firm ACE, a conformance suite of nearly 400,000 separate tests for C compilers. In 1989 UniForum's Canadian branch named Tilson Man of the Decade. By 1990 there were about fifty people.

On Monday 7 May 1990 the Santa Cruz Operation and HCR put out a joint press release announcing that SCO intended to acquire one hundred percent of "the leading UNIX System software company in Canada", subject to legal review and a shareholder vote, after which HCR would change its name to SCO Canada, Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed. The rumor had been circulating on Usenet beforehand, traced to someone inside HCR, and the thing Canadian users were asking about in public was whether support for Interactive 386/ix would survive. Tilson stayed to run Toronto as an SCO vice president. The release promised that the management structure would remain in place and that every current employee would keep their position. It went further than that: significant expansion of all the Toronto groups was likely in the coming year.

The last line Tilson gave the press release was about the reseller base. "We think the only surprises customers will see will be pleasant ones."

~ the bloor street office ~

In September 1995 SCO agreed to buy the UnixWare business from Novell, which had picked it up from Unix System Laboratories two years earlier. The New Jersey operation came with a languages and development tools group whose technology was ahead of what Toronto had been working on, and when that deal closed in December the SCO Canada engineering staff were largely redundant. The office was shut in early 1996. The press release promising growth in Toronto was by then nearly six years old.

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