IXI Limited

» see ixi.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1987 Ray Anderson left a research job at Torch Computers and started IXI in Cambridge. The product arrived the next year and it was called X.desktop, and the sales pitch on its own trifold flyer is still legible: instant confidence with Unix. Underneath that line it promised you could run programs and organize your work "without needing to know any UNIX commands or remember filenames", which in 1988 was a genuinely radical thing to offer a workstation user.

What X.desktop did was put icons and a trash can on top of the X Window System, so that the thing in front of a user looked like a desk instead of a prompt. It sold shrink-wrapped at $495, and it sold a great deal better through the back door, bundled into the Unix that the hardware vendor was already shipping. In 1992 the whole company turned over about six million dollars with around fifty people, and claimed over a million installations. Those two numbers together are the business model in miniature. The reach came through IBM's sales channel and so did almost none of the money.

SCO bought the company in February 1993. The acquisition is recorded in SCO's own annual report years later, in a director's biography rather than in a deal announcement. No price was ever disclosed.

~ the record ~

~ what it ran on ~

IXI's own flyer lists where X.desktop came bundled, and the list explains why six million dollars of turnover is a bad measure of this company. It shipped inside IBM's AIXwindows and inside SCO Open Desktop, inside NCR's Windows for UNIX, inside Unisys's Primary Graphical Environment and inside Uniplex Windows. Beyond the bundles it ran on Sun 3 and Sun 4 and SPARCstations, on DEC Ultrix and OSF/1, on the HP 9000 series, on MIPS, on Data General AViiON and Apollo, on Sequent and Pyramid, and on Interactive UNIX for Intel PCs.

If you sat down at a Unix machine in an office around 1991 and found a graphical desktop waiting, there was a real chance you were looking at the work of a few dozen people in a building on Burleigh Street, under a logo belonging to whoever made the hardware. I was seven years old while that was true, in a country where workstation Unix never showed up in a home at all.

~ the standard arrives ~

The flyer claims X.desktop 2 "has become the de-facto standard graphical desktop for X". It was a fair description for about five years and then it was not. CDE, the Common Desktop Environment, was announced in the middle of 1993 by the Unix vendors acting together, and it shipped about two years after that.

Once the vendors had written themselves a common desktop, the thing IXI sold had no buyer. Its entire customer list was companies that now had a committee-built alternative they had helped design and did not have to license. X.desktop's remaining users worked their way toward maintenance, and the workstation market they lived on was meanwhile losing people to Windows NT on cheaper hardware.

~ the name inside SCO ~

Anderson became a senior vice president of SCO and stayed on as managing director of IXI Limited, and the subsidiary was still being named that way in SCO filings in 1996. SCO bought Visionware of Leeds in December 1994 and merged the two British operations into IXI Visionware Ltd in 1995, after which the combined unit became SCO's Client Integration Division and the products were rebadged into something called the SCO Vision family.

That is three renamings inside a couple of years, and at the end of them the word IXI survived only on a company registration. What survives of the product itself is a scanned marketing flyer on the Internet Archive, printed in Cambridge, showing a desktop with a trash can and a folder somebody had named Marketing2.

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