Centera Technologies Inc., 1991

Centera Technologies, Inc. was a company based in Louisville, Colorado. It was previously known as SCO, Inc. This folder contains several documents relating to a relationship between SCO/Centera and the UCAR Foundation. There is an article from the December 14, 1987 issue of the journal Digital Review announcing SCO's new GRAPHkit product. This looked like it had a lot of features similar to NCAR Graphics, with some add-ons and was most likely based on the public domain version of NCAR Graphics. UCAR started charging for NCAR Graphics in late 1987. There is a communication in January of 1988 indicating that SCO was negotiating with the UCAR Foundation and then, on May 27, 1988 there is a memo from the UCAR Foundation stating, "Effective today UCAR Foundation has signed a license agreement with SCO, Inc. for the development and distribution of a commercial software product based on NCAR Graphics." There are documents detailing some misunderstandings between SCO and the UCAR Foundation. A later memo dated May 20, 1991, to Ginger Caldwell from Susan Smith with the subject "Policy for Centera Technologies Inc., Referrals," discusses only the sale and referrals to Centera concerning customers of IBM PCs or compatibles and saying that any requests for UNIX or VAX versions should be handled by SCD. One deduces that SCO's profits on their investment in NCAR Graphics were not satisfactory and that the company reemerged as Centera concentrating on PC software. The agreement with Centera had expired by late 1992. Commercialization of NCAR Graphics had been considered by several companies. Contained in this folder is a memo from Director Bill Buzbee, from April of 1987, discussing the issues.