IXI Limited was a British software company that developed and marketed windowing products for Unix, supporting all the popular Unix platforms of the time. Founded in 1987, it was based in Cambridge. The product it was most known for was X.desktop, a desktop environment graphical user interface built on the X Window System. IXI was acquired by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in February 1993.
Origins in the Cambridge hi-tech cluster
In the beginning of the 1970s, the so-called Cambridge hi-tech cluster became the site of a network of new firms in the rapidly growing computer field, many of which featured founders and employees who had studied at the University of Cambridge.
And in particular, as an article in the journal Regional Studies has noted, IXI was one of many companies started by founders or employees or those in the nexus of Cambridge-based Acorn Computers, the most noted of which is ARM Holdings.
IXI founder Ray Anderson was a graduate of the university who had become director of research and development<!-- https://archive.org/stream/PersonalComputerNews/PersonalComputerNews061-19May1984_djvu.txt --> at Torch Computers, a computer systems firm located in the Cambridge area that was most known for making peripherals for the BBC Micro made by Acorn. Torch built workstations among its products,
In the end, Torch was not successful, but its work inspired Anderson to carry the idea on. which would allow non-technical people to use such platforms. Consequently, while it supported the ability to provide such things, it contained no specification for application user-interface design such as buttons, menus, or window title-bar styles, nor did it provide a standard window manager, file manager, or desktop.
A crucial part of IXI's standard was to capitalize on standards and thus defeat competitors who were based more upon proprietary solutions. Part of this success was due to X.desktop coming with a customization toolkit that allowed system manufacturers to modify the appearance and functionality of the desktop environment to match their needs.
The X.desktop product was stated as being ported to, and sold on, over a dozen different Unix variants.
The primary competitor of X.desktop was the Looking Glass product from the American company Visix Software, Inc.
Eventually over a million instances of X.desktop were in use.
For 1992, IXI Ltd had revenues of about $6 million. By early 1993, the firm employed around 50 people, and in addition to its Cambridge headquarters, it also had offices in San Ramon, California, in the US and in Tokyo in Japan. in an announcement made on 25 February 1993. Terms of the purchase were not publicly disclosed, posed a competitive threat to X.desktop, but it took two years of further development until CDE actually came out.
Several new products were introduced during this time. IXI Panorama, introduced about a month after the acquisition, was a Motif-based window manager, that could run with or without X.desktop; it had the ability to plot and manage a virtual space much greater than the physical space of the monitor itself. Panorama was extended in March 1994 with IXI Mosaic, reflecting the incorporation of the first popular web browser, Mosaic, into the SCO Global Access product, a modified version of SCO Open Desktop that served as an Internet gateway. In doing this, SCO and IXI put out the world's first commercial web browser based on Mosaic, IXI also offered some twenty different Motif training courses for users. The IXI Wintif product, which became available in 1994, built further upon Premier Motif to create a version of Motif that had the look-and-feel of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and thus would enable Windows users to operate Unix applications without confusion or need for additional training. A later version extended this capability to Windows 95.
Then in 1995, the IXI business unit of SCO was merged with another SCO acquisition, the Leeds-based Visionware, to form IXI Visionware. (IXI had previously collaborated with Visionware, going back to 1988 when the Visionware technologies were first being developed within Systime Computers Ltd.) Later in 1995 the merged business unit was subsumed more fully into its parent and became the Client Integration Division of SCO, which put out products from both former companies under the "Vision"-branded family name. Tarantella, Inc. struggled and following company-wide layoffs, the Cambridge development site closed in the summer of 2003.<!-- per https://avaragado.org/tag/photos/ -->
Fates
The X.desktop code gradually went into maintenance mode as X.desktop OEM providers migrated to CDE and many end-users abandoned Unix-based workstations altogether and switched to Wintel platforms. Ray Anderson left SCO after several years there, and in 1999 founded Bango plc, a mobile commerce company based in Cambridge.