Locus Computing Corporation

~ the last words ~

The idea Locus was founded on is still not solved. You have several computers. You would like them to behave like one computer, so that a program does not know or care which box it is running on, and a file does not know or care which disk it lives on. Call it a single system image. UCLA built a Unix that did this and called it LOCUS, and in 1982 Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel left to sell it.

What they actually sold, for most of thirteen years, was engineering time. IBM hired them to produce AIX for the PS/2 and the System/370, and the UCLA single system image work shipped inside that as AIX TCF, the Transparent Computing Facility. Intel hired them to build a multiprocessor OSF/1 for the Paragon, a massively parallel machine with no shared memory, and for that they reworked TCF into Transparent Network Computing and invented the VPROC, a virtual process that stands in the same relation to a process as the VNODE does to an inode. Later the same lineage became UnixWare NonStop Clusters. None of this was a product you could buy in a box.

The product you could buy in a box was Merge. It ran DOS and then Windows 3.1 applications on a Unix system, in a window, next to everything else. Merge 3.2 for SCO OpenServer 5 was announced in May 1995, three months before the company stopped existing. The code went on without it for about fifteen more years, passing through TreLOS and NeTraverse before ending up as Win4Lin.

~ the record ~

~ the single machine illusion ~

What makes Locus worth a headstone is that it was right too early and in the wrong market. Every argument it was making in the 1980s about processes migrating between machines and filesystems that span a network is an argument the industry had again in 2005 with virtualization and again in 2015 with containers, and both times it was treated as new. Locus was selling it to buyers who had one mainframe and a plan to buy another.

Merge is the one piece of Locus I can reach for personally, and only sideways. When the question of running Windows programs without Windows reached me in Turkey, the answers on offer were Wine and a virtual machine, both free. The commercial product that had solved it first was by then two owners downstream of the engineers who wrote it, and nobody selling it mentioned Santa Monica.

~ what platinum bought ~

PLATINUM technology, the Illinois rollup that had bought 48 companies by the time it was itself sold, reached an agreement in principle in April 1995. The deal closed on 16 August. Platinum's annual report filed in March 1997 records the terms: all of the outstanding capital stock of Locus Computing Corporation in exchange for 1,452,445 shares of Platinum common stock, with a market value of approximately $33,000,000 at the time, plus assumed options converting into 231,905 more shares.

Two things in that filing are worth reading twice. The first is that it was accounted for as a pooling of interests, which means no purchase price exists at all; the $33 million everyone repeats is a valuation of a block of stock on one day, not money that changed hands. The second is the description Platinum gave of what it had bought: "a leading provider of consulting services for information technology users and suppliers." Thirteen years after the founders left UCLA to commercialize a distributed operating system, the buyer was describing the company it had just paid for as a consulting practice.

~ the sixteenth of august ~

English Wikipedia dates the end to 17 August 1995, and its source is a Business Wire release headlined "PLATINUM technology And Locus Computing Finalize Acquisition" carrying that date. Platinum's Form 10-K says 16 August. The press release is the announcement and the filing is the event, and a one day gap between the two is the most common way a company's death date comes out wrong.

The afterlife was short. Platinum took a pre-tax charge against Trinzic and Locus restructuring costs and folded the American operation in. The British arm, Locus Computing Corporation Ltd, was parked under a subsidiary called PLATINUM Solutions and still appears there in the 1996 subsidiary list. Platinum itself was bought by Computer Associates on 28 May 1999 for around $4.3 billion, by which point there was no Locus left inside it to buy.

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