Project Monterey was an attempt to build a single Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 that ran across a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, as well as supporting multi-processing. Announced in October 1998, several Unix vendors were involved; IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 provided POWER

IBM POWER

POWER is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by IBM. The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC....

 and PowerPC

PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

 support from AIX

AIX operating system

AIX AIX AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced "a i ex" is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms...

, Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) provided IA-32

IA-32

IA-32 , also known as x86-32, i386 or x86, is the CISC instruction-set architecture of Intel's most commercially successful microprocessors, and was first implemented in the Intel 80386 as a 32-bit extension of x86 architecture...

 support, and Sequent

Sequent Computer Systems

Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing open systems, innovating in both hardware and software Sequent Computer Systems, or Sequent, was...

 added multi-processing (MP) support from their DYNIX/ptx

Dynix

Dynix is an operating system developed by Sequent. It is a flavor of Unix based on BSD. DYNIX was replaced by DYNIX/ptx, which was based on the System V version of UNIX produced by AT&T....

 system. Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

 provided expertise and ISV

Independent software vendor

Independent software vendor is a business term for companies specializing in making or selling software, designed for mass marketing or for niche markets...

 development funding for porting to the new IA-64 platform, which had not yet been released at that time. The focus of the project was to create an enterprise-class UNIX for the IA-64, which at the time was expected to eventually dominate the UNIX server market.

In May 2001, the project announced the availability of a beta test version AIX-5L for the IA-64, basically meeting its original primary goal. However, Intel had missed its delivery date for the Itanium

Itanium

Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture . Intel markets the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems...

 (the initial IA-64 hardware) by two years, and the Monterey software had no market.

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. Such efforts had been undertaken in the past (e.g., 3DA

3DA

3DA was an alliance formed between The Santa Cruz Operation and Hewlett Packard in September 1995. Its purpose was to unify SCO's OpenServer product, UnixWare , and HP-UX from HP; the resulting product would then become the de facto Unix standard for both existing x86 systems and the upcoming...

) and had generally failed, as the companies involved were too reliant on vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in

In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs...

to really support a standard that would allow their customers to leave for other products. With Monterey, three 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.

The project rapidly became unmanageable as all involved attempted to find a niche in the rapidly developing Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 market and focused their efforts elsewhere. Sequent was acquired by IBM in 1999. In 2000, SCO's UNIX business was purchased by Caldera Systems, a Linux distributor, who later renamed themselves to SCO Group

SCO Group

TSG Group, Inc. is a software company formerly called The SCO Group, Caldera Systems, and Caldera International. After acquiring the Santa Cruz Operation's Server Software and Services divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, the company changed its focus to UNIX...

. In the same year, IBM eventually declared Monterey dead. Intel, IBM, Caldera, and others had also been running a parallel effort to port Linux to IA-64, Project Trillian

Project Trillian

Project Trillian was an effort by an industry consortium to port the Linux operating system to the Itanium processor. The project started in May 1999 with the goal of releasing the distribution in time for the initial release of Itanium, then scheduled for early 2000...

, which delivered workable code in February 2000. In late 2000, IBM announced a major effort to support Linux.

The breakdown of Project Monterey was one of the factors leading to a lawsuit

SCO-Linux controversies

The SCO-Linux controversies are a series of legal and public disputes between the software company SCO Group and various Linux vendors and users. The SCO Group alleges that its license agreements with IBM means that source code that IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in...

 in 2003, where SCO Group sued IBM

SCO v. IBM

SCO v. IBM is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.-Summary:On March 6, 2003,...

over their contributions to Linux.

IBM sold only 32 licenses of Monterey in 2001, and fewer in 2002.