Project Monterey was an attempt to build a single Unix-like operating system that ran across a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, as well as supporting multi-processing. Several existing Unix vendors were involved; IBM provided POWER and PowerPC support from AIX, SCO provided the Intel IA-32 support, and Sequent added multi-processing (MP) support from their Dynix/ptx system. All three also colaborated on porting to the new IA-64 platform, which had not yet been released at that time.

With the exception of the IA-64 port and Dynix MP improvements, much of the Monterey effort was an attempt to standardize existing versions of Unix into a single compatible system. This was not the first such attempt at a standardization system. there had been two such efforts in the recent past, but these relied on vendors adapting their own systems to the standard, which they generally didn't want to do. With Monterey each of the vendors already had a niche they expected to continue to serve in the future, POWER and IA-64 for IBM, IA-32 and IA-64 for SCO, but it is not exactly clear what Sequent expected to get from the project.

The project rapidly became unmanagable as all involved attempted to find a niche in the rapidly developing Linux market and focussed their efforts elsewhere. IBM eventually declared Monterey dead by IBM in 2001. IBM had also been running a parallel effort to port Linux to IA-64, Project Trillian, which delivered workable code after Monterey died.

More recently, Monterey has been the focus of "the new SCO"'s efforts to sue IBM for copyright infringement. SCO claims that after the death of Monterey, IBM used several portions of SCO's code in newer versions of AIX on POWER, as well as taking code and including it into the existing IA-32 versions of Linux. Their claim appears to be that they were unaware of IBM's intentions to eventually move to Linux, that IBM fooled SCO into providing code for Monterey to help them to this end.

This claim appears to be highly arguable; IBM's intentions to use Monterey on POWER were well known at the time, as several press releases from the era note. Likewise, SCO (then known as Caldera) was a member of the Trillian team as well, and therefore must have been aware of IBM's work on Linux.

References

• More AIX/POWER/Project Monterey Evidence