Univel

» see univel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Novell and AT&T's Unix System Laboratories said in October 1991 that they meant to start a company together, declined to say how it would be divided, and signed the real agreement that December. Trading began in San Jose before the year was out. Novell took 55 percent, the new company started life with about $30 million in cash and other assets, and Joel Appelbaum, lately a vice president at the Unix lab, was put in charge. Novell's own annual report describes the purpose in the flat language of a filing: to accelerate the expanded use of the UNIX operating system in the personal computer and network computing marketplace.

Underneath that sentence is an awkward fact about both parents. AT&T owned the Unix source license and sold it to the companies it competed with. Novell owned NetWare and the office network but not an operating system worth the name. Neither could buy the other in 1991, so they built a third company and handed it the one job that needed both of them, which was shipping Unix shrink-wrapped for a machine somebody might buy in a shop.

That job produced UnixWare, which began shipping in December 1992, and then the company ran out of reasons to exist. In 1992 I was eight and in Ankara, and the first modem in our house was still years away, so there is no memory here for me to offer. What stays legible at thirty years' remove is the corporate shape rather than the software. A joint venture is what two companies build when the deal they actually need is the one they cannot do.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the one product ~

UnixWare came in two editions. The Personal Edition was for a desktop user at $495, and the Application Server, meant for downsizing work onto client-server setups, was $2,495. A software development kit cost $995 on top. Univel recommended a 25MHz 386SX with 8MB of memory and an 80MB disk for the desktop version, which was a real machine in 1992 but not a cheap one.

On 15 March 1993, about three months after shipping, Univel cut the Personal Edition to $249 and the Application Server to $1,299, and stopped charging $395 extra for the Microsoft Windows compatibility that had been an add-on. Price cuts of roughly half within a quarter of launch are not a pricing strategy. Appelbaum had told reporters the previous October that 100,000 units in the first fiscal year would make the company profitable.

~ redundant by acquisition ~

In December 1992 Novell and AT&T announced that Novell would buy Unix System Laboratories outright, and the deal closed on 14 June 1993 for about 11.1 million Novell shares worth $321.8 million. From that morning the joint venture was a partnership between a company and its own new subsidiary. Novell's press release that same day still said Univel continued to operate from its headquarters in San Jose.

A few weeks later it did not. In early July Novell moved both the Unix lab and Univel into a new Unix Systems Group under Kanwal Rekhi, and Rekhi told the trade press that Univel would be folded back in and cease to exist. Note the tense, because it is all anyone ever got: Univel was still listed as a Novell subsidiary in the annual report filed for the year ending 30 October 1993, four months after that statement, and it is simply absent from the same list a year later. Nobody announced an ending and no document names the day.

The product was luckier than the company. Novell sold the UnixWare business to The Santa Cruz Operation on 6 December 1995, and the name went on through Caldera and the SCO Group to Xinuos, which still lists UnixWare 7 for sale. The word Univel does not appear anywhere on that company's site.

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