HCR Corporation

Human Computing Resources Corporation, later HCR Corporation, was a Canadian software company that worked on the Unix operating system and system and business software for it. Founded in 1976, it was based in Toronto.

HCR Corporation
TypePrivate
IndustryComputer software
FateAcquired by SCO in 1990
Founded1976
Defunct1996
Headquarters
Toronto
,
Canada
Key people
Products
  • Unix
  • Business applications
  • Development tools
Revenue$3.2 million CAD (1984)
Number of employees
  • 48 (1985)
  • 50 (1990)

By a later description of one of its founders, HCR was a "UNIX contract R&D and technology development and marketing firm."[1] The company was most known for its extensive knowledge of Unix, for porting Unix to new hardware platforms, for developing compilers as part of the porting work, and for the consulting and product development work it did on Unix. As such it was a pioneer in the Unix industry and by one account was the second firm ever to commercially support Unix.[2] By 1990 HCR was Canada's leading commercial Unix platform developer[3] and a prominent player in the Canadian Unix scene.[4]

HCR was acquired by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1990. It became the subsidiary SCO Canada, Inc., which existed until 1996 when the Toronto offices were closed down.

Origins at the University of Toronto

Human Computing Resources was founded in 1976 by several computer scientists at, and graduates of, the University of Toronto, with the aim of creating computer graphics and systems software.[5][6] The company was privately held.[3] Foremost among these co-founders[7] was Ronald Baecker, an associate professor n the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto and a significant figure and pioneer in the field of human–computer interaction.[8] Baecker served as president of the new firm.[6]

Another co-founder was Michael Tilson, who as a graduate student of Baecker's[9] at the University of Toronto during the mid-1970s was one of the early pioneers of Unix adoption in Canada.[4] And another co-founder was David Tilbrook,[10] a student of Baecker's who had developed the interactive NewsWhole pagination system for the Toronto Globe & Mail, which became an early predecessor to desktop publishing.[8] (Other Baecker students who later became well known in the Unix world included Rob Pike and Tom Duff,[9] although neither worked at HCR.)

Formative years
Location of the offices of Human Computing Resources

Consulting and contracting

The new company's offices were on St. Mary Street,[11] in a mid-century modern building just off Yonge Street in the Bay Street Corridor section of Toronto.[12]

Initially Human Computing Resources focused on information technology consulting and contract programming jobs.[6] An early customer for contract work was IBM.[13]

But it also tried to establish a product business, with an effort underway by 1977 to try to market the NewsWhole newspaper layout product.[14] Despite newspapers seeing demonstrations of the product and liking it, they were unwilling to commit their businesses to a product from an unproven, very small software business.[13] As Tilson later said, "The company quickly discovered that the software industry was not a bed of roses."[13]

In 1978 Human Computing Resources began giving courses in the Toronto area on computers for personal use - the Commodore PET - and for business.[11] By 1979 the new firm had begun exhibiting at the annual Canadian Computer Show and Conference in Toronto.[15] Baecker maintained a part-time involvement in his academic career during this period.[16]

Unix specialists

Human Computing Resources began to focus on writing software for the Unix operating system,[6][17] which was starting to gain a foothold outside its Bell Labs founding place. By one account, HCR was the second firm to support Unix commercially, following Interactive Systems Corporation in the US in 1977.[2]

Microsoft was working on its version of Unix, called Xenix, and in 1982 engaged with the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in this work, with the two companies' engineers working together on improvements.[18] Microsoft and SCO then further engaged HCR in Canada, and a software products group within Logica plc in the United Kingdom, as part of making further improvements to Xenix and porting Xenix to other platforms.[18] In doing so, Microsoft gave HCR and Logica the rights to do Xenix ports and license Xenix binaries in those territories.[19] As a result, some of Xenix was developed by Human Computing Resources in Toronto.[20] The early history of Xenix has a sometimes unclear narrative, but some accounts HCR had a greater role than that, as it had to take over the initial porting the AT&T Version 7 Unix after Microsoft was unable to do so.[21]

In particular, as Baecker later said, HCR's business became doing "UNIX operating systems programming for hardware companies without UNIX expertise needing to bring UNIX to market quickly."[22] As such their customer space was in the OEM and VAR markets, including the likes of Control Data Corporation, NCR, Prime Computer, and National Semiconductor.[6] Tilson himself published a lengthy piece in Byte magazine about their work on the NS16032 as a case study of doing a Unix port.[23] Other architectures they worked on included the PDP-11, VAX, Motorola 68000, Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000, PERQ workstation, and Computer Automation 4/95.[24]

The work involved often included establishing Unix environments and functioning compilers for the C programming language on various different 16-bit and 32-bit processors.[24] The work also stressed the portability traits, good and bad, of the C language.[24] An employee of HCR in the early 1980s, Richard Miller,[25] had had an especially historic role in Unix, having done one the first port of Unix to a non-PDP architecture in 1977 while he was at the University of Wollongong in Australia.[2][26]

By 1983, the trade magazine InfoWorld was stating that HCR "probably has more experience porting UNIX to different architectures than anyone else."[27]

The HCR variant of Unix was branded as Unity.[28] Initially based on UNIX System III, it was primarily sold on a stand-alone basis for the PDP-11 and VAX-11 minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation.[29] Moreover, HCR had an implementation of Unity that ran under the VMS operating system on VAX-11; in doing so they sought to capitalize on the large VAX/VMS installed base of the early-mid 1980s.[28] In addition, Unity was sold on an OEM basis for other architectures, which in 1983 included the NS16032 and the Motorola 68000.[30]

Other products

Besides Unix itself, the company was showcasing a variety of system software products.[31] These included a compiler for the Pascal programming language and an interpreter for the BASIC programming language.[29] Cross compilers from VAX Unix to the NS16032 architecture for C, Pascal, and Fortran 77 were also offered.[32] There was a Unix-based RT-11 emulator.[33] For ease of use in using the operating system, there was the configurable HCR Menu Shell, which ran atop the standard Bourne shell and provided a more friendlier and customizable interface, and the HCR/EDIT screen-oriented text editor.[32][33]

In addition, HCR often worked with, and did active marketing for, the Mistress relational database system,[10][34] which was supported commercially by Rhodnius Ltd, another Toronto-based software firm.[33] HCR also put out several business applications.[31] By 1983, UNIX Review trade publication was referring to HCR as a "well-known software vendor".[35]

Financials

HCR received funding in 1982 and 1983 from two Canadian venture capital firms, Ventures West Technologies and TD Capital Group, with the two combined ending up with 50 percent ownership of HCR.[6] More money was subsequently raised by diluting existing shares.[6]

The company was profitable during some of these years.[6] Revenues rose from $1.3 million CAD in 1982 to $2.2 million in 1983 to $3.2 million in 1984.[6] Some 80 percent of the company's sales came from the United States, 15 percent from Europe, and 5 percent from Canada itself.[6]

There was competition, as other companies were in this area too. Besides Interactive Systems Corporation and SCO, companies doing Unix ports or substantial work with Unix included UniSoft, Microport, and a number of smaller outfits.[10]

As Unix began to penetrate into wider consciousness in the 1980s, employees at Human Computing Resources became Unix evangelists, being quoted in newspaper articles as the operating system became more discussed in technology circles,[17] and appearing in overseas symposiums with the likes of Unix inventors and pioneers Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Samuel J. Leffler, P. J. Plauger, and others.[36] HCR also gave training courses in Unix.[29] It also gave executive seminars describing the importance and impact of Unix at its offices in Toronto,[37] as well as introductory seminars on the subject in various North American cities.[38] HCR staff frequently published articles for, or presented at conferences of, the USENIX association.[39]

Overall, however, HCR did not focus on one specific mission. Years later Baecker spoke of the "Three Losing Product Strategies of HCR", and began by being critical of the time he was in charge of the company, saying that its strategy reflected his personality: "the academic, the visionary, ... go everywhere, which is to have no focus and to go nowhere".[22]

Change in leadership

In February 1984, Baecker stepped down as president of HCR,[6] and returned on a more active basis to the faculty of the University of Toronto.[7] He was replaced as president by Dennis Kukulsky, formerly a national sales manager with Tektronix.[6] Baecker remained as chairman of the company.[1]

Under Kukulsky, the company sought to focus the company on software products that would run on Unix,[6] and in particular, products aimed at business users.[17] The company was faced with a significant loss for 1985, due to increased development costs and putting additional resources into sales and marketing, including opening sales offices in the United States.[6]

HCR brought to a release point the Chronicle Business Applications Software suite in 1985.[32] HCR's Chronicle included modules for general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable, as well as inventory, invoicing, purchase orders, and sales and profitability analysis.[6]

This was followed in 1986 by HCR's Chariot UNIX Business Software, which sold for around $7,500 a development system.[40] It included the business application modules of Chronicle but more importantly contained a 4GL-like application generator to allow HCR's customers to create new business applications or further tailor existing ones.[41][22] Chariot was aimed at value-added resellers (VARs) and ran on the DEC VAX, IBM PC AT, AT&T 3B, and NCR Tower.[41] Some 1,500 VARs signed up for Chariot.[42]

These products were not especially successful,[22] with very little actual revenue coming in from the business products and substantial development costs incurred.[13] Overall, Human Computing Resources went through the same tribulations as many software firms, such as a failing to accurately predict development costs and being unsure how to market products once developed.[43] One executive commented to the Financial Post that when it came to software, "Pricing is a black art."[43]

Baecker later spoke critically of this era of the company as well, saying that it had embodied Kukulsky's personality of "the salesman, the opportunist ... go where the money is, i.e., 4GLs for UNIX, an area in which HCR had no expertise".[22]

Change of name and another change in leadership
The 10th floor of this office building at 130 Bloor Street West in Toronto (here seen in 1999) housed the offices of HCR Corporation and later SCO Canada, Inc.

By July 1986, Kukulsky was gone and the president of the company was co-founder Tilson.[43] He had previously been serving as vice president of technical development at the company.[36] The company divested itself of the business products,[13] deciding to return its focus to system software and developers.[42]

By 1987, the official name of the company had changed to HCR Corporation.[44] The headquarters office had moved as well, now being located a short distance away in a Bloor Street building in the Yorkville neighborhood of Toronto.[44]

The firm continued to have a visible presence in the Unix industry. Tilson gave talks at Unix-focused conferences, such as AUUG, about the importance and the future of Unix.[44] In 1989 the Canadian branch of UniForum named Tilson the Man of the Decade for his work on Unix.[4]

The company continued to do sophisticated Unix porting work, such as having a contract with ETA Systems to develop a C compiler and port Unix System V with Berkeley Software Distribution networking improvements to that company's ETA10 vector processor supercomputer.[45] Similarly, HCR had a contract with Intel to develop C and Fortran 77 compilers for the iWarp parallel computing supercomputer architecture.[46] HCR used the Bell Labs Portable C Compiler (pcc) as a starting point for much of this kind of work, but they had developed components of their own, such as a portable intermediate-code global optimizer that fit into the pcc scheme.[46]

The company made a focus on development tools. By 1989 HCR was still a vendor for a BASIC interpreter and Pascal compiler,[10] and had added a compiler for the burgeoning C++ programming language that was based on AT&T's Cfront.[47] Their advertisements for the HCR/C++ product emphasized the multiple platform packaging, documentation, and support services that came with it.[48] HCR was an early participant in the ISO C++ standardization effort.[49]

HCR also provided validation services and a test suite for C compilers.[10][33] A collaboration undertaken in 1989–90 with Associated Computer Experts (ACE) of the Netherlands resulted in the release of SuperTest, a suite that included nearly 400,000 separate tests of C compiler conformance and quality.[50]

In addition, HCR developed and sold the Configuration Control Menu System, or CoCo.[32] This product was designed to manage change requests and supported a form of code review based around email available on Unix platforms.[32][51] A survey article in Software Engineering Notes pronounced CoCo an "interesting tool" that could be used in conjunction with existing Unix-based configuration management commands such as SCCS and the like.[51]

During the Unix Wars of the late 1980s, HCR was affiliated on the Unix International side.[52]

By 1990, HCR had around 50 employees.[4] The company did not disclose its annual revenues at that point.[4]

In Baecker's later review of the company's strategic history, he summarized this period as reflecting Tilson's nature of "the technologist, the pragmatist, the realist ... go where HCR had expertise, i.e., UNIX software development tools ... unfortunately, too late".[22] However, Tilson's recollections revealed a more positive view: "My role as CEO was to turn the company around with greater focus on core business. The ultimate result was to be acquired as a healthy business with a good return for shareholders and new opportunities for employees."[53]

Acquisition by SCO

The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) announced on 9 May 1990 that it was acquiring HCR Corporation.[4] Financial terms were not disclosed but the companies said it would be a "share swap with a multimillion dollar value."[3] The acquired entity would take on the name SCO Canada, Inc., and operate as an independent subsidiary company.[54] Tilson remained head of the operation and became a vice president of SCO.[55] The two companies had been both allies and competitors at different times in the past,[1] as had the software products group of Logica (which had been part of the early Xenix work, and which SCO had previously acquired in 1986).[56][57][19]

The HCR acquisition allowed SCO to improve its development tools offerings, especially for the recently released SCO OpenDesktop operating system.[58] SCO Canada also took over work on the existing SCO Microsoft C compiler that dated back to Xenix days; it was offered in addition to the pcc compiler as part of the SCO OpenDesktop Development System.[59] SCO Canada continued to sell the HCR C++ product, which by 1991 had an estimated 450 licensed sites using it,[60] and maintained a role in the language's standardization effort.[61]

SCO Canada also took on some other work, such as providing strategic partners with porting assistance to SCO Unix,[62] and doing integration work between SCO Unix and Novell NetWare.[63]

In September 1995, it was announced that SCO was buying the New Jersey-based UnixWare and related Unix business from Novell, which had earlier acquired it from Unix Systems Laboratories in 1993.[64] The New Jersey office had a languages and development tools group with more advanced technology than what SCO Canada had been working with,[65] and that made the SCO Canada engineering staff largely redundant once the Novell deal was closed in December 1995. The SCO Canada office was shut down in early 1996.[66]

References
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