Anyone remember Coherent Unix?

[Mark Davidson]

At one point, there was a web site (in Europe, I believe) that had a 
complete archive of the Coherent distribution.  Unfortunately, Coherent 
has very few drivers and those that exist don't play well with modern 
hardware.  For example, Coherent's disk utility for setting up file 
systems absolutely has problems with drives of any reasonable size 
today (I had problems getting it to work with an 8 GB IDE drive, for 
example).

Also, and I know this sounds picky, but it's not "Coherent Unix"... 
it's "Coherent".  It has NO AT&T code in it.  The Mark Williams Company 
wrote most of the code themselves, and eventually added support for X 
Windows before the company folded.  Even the C compiler was theirs (and 
if I remember correctly, they had a great C compiler for Intel chips).

When Coherent first came out, it cost something like $500... later, the 
price dropped to $99.  Unfortunately for MWC, Coherent started becoming 
popular right about the time Linux took off, and it was kind of hard 
for them to compete.  Because Coherent was a "look-alike", there were 
many programs used that were rather difficult to port to Coherent.  I 
remember struggling to get UUCP working properly and having to bug MWC 
to fix problems so I could use Coherent for news exchange (this was 
back before NNTP).

I had many happy months working with Coherent in those days (back when 
a "real" port of Unix would cost thousands of dollars), and was sorry 
to see it go.

Mark Davidson

On Jan 13, 2005, at 11:16 AM, Innfogra at aol.com wrote:

> I am interested in it's history. Could you summarize it a little. I 
> still
> have a couple sets of their SW although I have never run it.
>
> Paxton
>