8 ms·

Coherent OS

82 points by Jaruzel 7y ago

_bxg1 7y ago
Did Linux deal with any of the same legal scrutiny?
- hobo_mark 7y ago
  Yes, for years... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO–Linux_disputes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO–Linux_disputes
  - msla 7y ago
    SCO was a farce. Microsoft used a company called BayStar to fund SCO's lawsuits, which had absolutely nothing to them; SCO wouldn't even release the evidence it claimed to have proving code copying for a suspiciously long period of time, and when the evidence was released, it was nothing of the sort. Ultimately, the legal merits of the case wouldn't have mattered, in that a bad lawsuit can still drown an opponent. What mattered was that Microsoft waited too damn long to try it: One of the players on the other side was IBM, which by then had a serious business in Linux on mainframes, and a two-bit nuisance suit jumped up with some venture capital wasn't going to sink the damn Nazgul. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2547289/baystar-exec-says-microsoft--guaranteed--sco-investment.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2547289/baystar-exec-s...
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      >Microsoft used a company called BayStar to fund SCO's lawsuits Your article suggests otherwise. It seems like some over-eager Microsoft exec promised that BayStar's investment would be 'guaranteed' by Microsoft. That exec was subsequently fired and nothing was formalized. BayStar ultimately lost money on SCO. But even that much is suspect as this account is hearsay and comes from a managing member of BayStar who has cause to deflect blame for his or his company's dumb investment in SCO.
      - msla 7y ago
        Maybe I assume too much skulduggery on the part of Ballmer-era "THE GPL IS CANCER! LINUX IS CANCER!" Microsoft when it comes to something which attempts to hurt Linux.
        macspoofing 7y ago
        >Maybe I assume too much skulduggery Yes. Just because you don't like Microsoft, doesn't mean you can just claim things that are untrue.
      - fulafel 7y ago
        MS claimed to have changed their minds, but it's hard to say what really went on there. Due to the nature of the whole enterprise people would be very conscious of what to put on paper / email. It seems plausible that the SVP was just paid a lot of money to quit and not refute the blame placed on him after the rest of MS decided to wash their hands. (And in any event, actions by the responsible executives are actions of the company, and going back to say "it was just this guy, not MS the company" is not really the right way to think about it)
        macspoofing 7y ago
        Again, you're taking the words of a BayStar managing member at face value. Why? He has a reason to lie and deflect blame. There is no other supporting evidence. Nothing else rings true about his story either. Like for example, you don't make a big investment as private equity firm based on flimsy (at best) guarantees. Regardless, had that guarantee actually happened and BayStar really believed it, they would have sued Microsoft just to embarrass them and force a settlement. I'm sure Microsoft was applauding the lawsuit but that doesn't mean they funded it as OP just outright stated. > It seems plausible that the SVP was just paid a lot of money to quit and not refute the blame placed on him after the rest of MS decided to wash their hands. Only if you're conspiratorial minded because that doesn't seem plausible at all. I think your dislike of Microsoft clouds your judgment.
    - kjs3 7y ago
      It's just a little more complicated than that. If you're interested in what really happened, go to http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20080803065719599 http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2008080306... and explore the actual decade plus story.
      - msla 7y ago
        I was reading Groklaw at the time, but not closely enough to be able to summarize the entire thing in a single Hacker News post without simplifying.
        kjs3 7y ago
        Choosing one debatable point out of a decade plus of litigation involving a dozen entities, millions of pages of legal fillings, untold legal rulings, and declaring "this summarizes the whole thing" is in the best possible case a dubious conclusion. In this case it's ridiculous.
cowmix 7y ago
Coherent was a great option in and around the 1990-92 timeframe. It was a great UNIX clone for $99 (with a great manual to boot). What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack. It would have been the perfect Internet OS.
- anyfoo 7y ago
  Just from memory, I can sort of see how they could have mistaken those priorities. Windowing systems (with which X11 was synonymous on unixy systems) were a big deal at the time, while TCP/IP, even networking in general, was still emerging in what probably was Coherent's target market. Coherent did have UUCP, didn't it? In a lot of cases, that got you much further in small to mid scale environments than TCP/IP. I wouldn't even be surprised if Novell Netware would have been considered more important.
  - teh_klev 7y ago
    > I wouldn't even be surprised if Novell Netware would have been considered more important. Speaking as a field engineer from the UK from days of yore... Up until around 1995 IPX/SPX, Novell's default networking stack at that time, was hugely prevalent in corporate and governmental environments. I didn't start bumping into TCP/IP in any serious way until around 1992 in my job as a field engineer. The general kinda setup was groups of departmental Novell Netware 386 servers (I was a Netware engineer since around '87) with loads of DOS and Windows 2/3.x clients running Novell's IPX/SPX stack atop NE2000 compatible NIC's. Around '95 things changed. Novell Netware 4 (as did NT 3.51 - NT done properly) shipped and the default stack became TCP/IP...the rest is history.
    - Jaruzel 7y ago
      I think people forget how prevalent IPX/SPX and Netware was back in the late 80s-early 90s. Fun anecdote: I used to work on a large MoD site as PC support during that era, and one call I got was to visit a bunch of porta-cabins to fix their Netware network because they wanted to play network DOOM and for some reason it wasn't working.
anyfoo 7y ago
This is only based on playing around with it in a VM and poking at its source code after it was open sourced with a BSD license in 2015, but to me, Coherent seemed like a quite well put together system. Enough that it made me a bit sad that it's now an OS of the past.
- simonblack 7y ago
  Coherent's misfortune was that it was released at the same time that Linux was. All through the 90s as I progressed from Coherent to AT&T Unix to Novell's Unixware to Sun's Solaris, I used to to look at Linux every six months or so. I was always gobsmacked at how quickly Linux (actually Gnu/Linux) was moving ahead in leaps and bounds. By the time that 2001 rolled around, it was time for me to put away my Solaris and switch to Linux fulltime.
  - ecksii 7y ago
    While Linux would have certainly killed Coherent eventually, that's not quite the case. First Coherent was out long before Linux. Coh was around long enough for AT&T to have sent Dennis Ritchie to Chicago to inspect the code and evaluate it for copyright claims. Coherent ran on the PDP11 and on the 80286. Linux became a real force in the Unix market around 1998. MWC went out of business in Feb 1995. The first round of layoffs at MWC happened in Oct, 1994. A perfect storm of several things killed Coherent The two biggest problems were: The customers dinging Mark Williams Company in the newsgroup mainly complained about the lack of TCP/IP networking. This happened because MWC had done a customer pole to see what big feature should come next? TCP/IP or X11. X11 won. The real or perceived drop in quality of the product. This one is hard to explain. Coherent 3.10 and 4.0 had been solid V7 Unix clones with V7 sensibilities. When 4.2.05 shipped it included a really nasty disk driver bug that basically destroyed your file system beyond the ability of fsck to fix. The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode. This mode was rare or hadn't existed during the days of MFM/RLL/ESDI drives but became common with ATA drives especially as the market got flooded with cheap 504MB drives. While the bug was fixed somewhere between 4.2.10 and 4.2.14, the damage to Coherent's reputation was done.
teh_klev 7y ago
Back in the day (early 1991) just before Linux appeared I convinced my company to pay for a copy of Coherent and they agreed. It was $99 and I learned a decent amount of Unixy basics on my el-cheapo clone 386 PC. In summary it was a pretty decent learning tool. I managed to get it to connect to my ISP and get some basic text based internet kinda things done. I eventually filched a copy of SCO Unix from a customer (which is what I had to support way back then - along with SCO Xenix) with a license key and ran that for a bit and once Linux became a bit more stable (for me it was Slackware circa 1994/1995) I started running that instead. I kinda wonder what would have happened if MWC had open sourced Coherent back then (provided they owned all their own code, or the third party code was compatible with GPL/MIT/et-al)?
EvanAnderson 7y ago
Fun fact - The Mark Williams Company[1], who made Coherent, was founded by Aaron Schwartz father, Robert Schwartz [2]. A couple of friends and I drooled over an AT&T Unix manual that our public library had in 1990 - 1991. Unix seemed really cool but we could never afford a real Unix machine. We talked about pooling our money and buying a copy of Coherent but we never did. Then Linux came on the scene and Coherent was forgotten. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
simonblack 7y ago
Coherent was my entrance to the wonderful world of Unix back in 1991. Thanks to Coherent's introduction I never ever had to endure Windows as my everyday personal desktop environment.
tyingq 7y ago
I remember the magazine ads for it: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzVzVxKynE/To2Hu97jlLI/AAAAAAAAAD8/oo15jOBz0JY/s1600/Coherent+4.0+OS+32-bit+which+runs+on+80386+and+80486+machine+advert.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzVzVxKynE/To2Hu97jlLI/AAAAAAAAAD...
icedchai 7y ago
I ran this on a 386SX for while in 1991. It came with a very comprehensive "Unix" manual. A couple years later I switched to Linux...
Foroldhack44 7y ago
in 1990, while working for an insurance company, we were looking for what UNIX to port a multi user database to, We looked at SCO, Microport, Cohernet and Sperry. The company chose Microport, and the Sperry went back, so I got to keep SCO and Coherent. Loaded and ran both, liked SCO a tiny bit more because of it successfully compiling a few programs, and heard about the UNIX Copyright controversy. Coherent installed, and ran, but had a few incompatibilities with our software, but ran solid as hell. The documentation was very good too.
wstrange 7y ago
This brings back a lot of memories. I was an intern an Inetco sytems in Vancouver (circa 1989?). They developed switching software for ATMs that used Coherent running on Intel PCs. My task was to extend the Coherent shell (a clone of the standard Unix sh) with BSD csh features (history, etc.). I had nothing to go on except the csh man page. I have since lost the source code (it was called the "wsh"), but I suspect I would cringe looking at it now. Coherent was definitely my gateway drug into Unix.
bifrost 7y ago
I remember using Coherent along with Xenix around the same time. I think I tried everything I could get my hands on :) I even used 386BSD heh.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Almost bought it after seeing the stunningly low price. $99 for a Unix like OS? It seemed too good to be true. At the time my housemate and I ran a small multiline BBS we wanted to make into something bigger. Coherent would have been to run Picospan after seeing how well M-Net worked. Someone we contacted at the Mark Williams Company said they didn't think Picospan would work with Coherent's memory model. No idea if that was correct but we went with MajorBBS instead for our big upgrade. Still thought about buying it to play with but Linux showed up before I had the spare money for Coherent.
nineteen999 7y ago
These days (as another poster has already pointed out) it is under an Open Source license. The author of this page: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/index.html https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/index.html previously worked for MWC and has put some quite detailed notes on setting up various aspects of Coherent running under Virtualbox there.
nils-m-holm 7y ago
In case somebody did not know yet: Coherent is officially free software now. You can download disk images with the whole system, including full, self-replicting source code, here: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/vms/ https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/vms/ Udo's Coherent pages in general are worth a visit: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/
luismedel 7y ago
I met about Coherent thanks a small article in the spanish edition of ComputerWorld[1]. I was 13 y/o and all my computer knowledge was about Basic, Pacal, DOS and Win3.1. Good times. I still remember the accompanying picture in the article, showing the windowing system with an astronaut picture in a window, some terminals and a file explorer. I think that picture inspired my view of what operating systems should be, more than everything I've seen since then. Also, I recently stumbled upon Idris[2], which, as far as I know, predates Xenix and Coherent in the PC scene. [1] https://www.computerworld.es/archive/omega-anuncia-coherent-un-clonico-de-unix-de-bajo-precio-y-facilidad-de-uso https://www.computerworld.es/archive/omega-anuncia-coherent-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system)
tass 7y ago
My dad (or maybe his work) bought Coherent for him to learn UNIX and we had a setup in the garage with serially-connected VT100-like terminals. It was my only time knowingly using a UNIX-like OS until a few years later when I installed Slackware.
MarkMMullin 7y ago
Ran this on the Ithaca Intersystems Z-8000 based rig in the early/mid '80s - it was remarkably command compatible with V7 for the basics, even built a MicroAngelo based 3D graphics system on it.....the biggest problem the box had wasn't Coherent, it was the fact the socketed logic on the custom MMU S100 card kept trying to walk out of the sockets because of thermal issues

Coherent OS

82 points by Jaruzel 7y ago

_bxg1 7y ago

Did Linux deal with any of the same legal scrutiny?

hobo_mark 7y ago
Yes, for years... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO–Linux_disputes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO–Linux_disputes
- msla 7y ago
  SCO was a farce. Microsoft used a company called BayStar to fund SCO's lawsuits, which had absolutely nothing to them; SCO wouldn't even release the evidence it claimed to have proving code copying for a suspiciously long period of time, and when the evidence was released, it was nothing of the sort. Ultimately, the legal merits of the case wouldn't have mattered, in that a bad lawsuit can still drown an opponent. What mattered was that Microsoft waited too damn long to try it: One of the players on the other side was IBM, which by then had a serious business in Linux on mainframes, and a two-bit nuisance suit jumped up with some venture capital wasn't going to sink the damn Nazgul. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2547289/baystar-exec-says-microsoft--guaranteed--sco-investment.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2547289/baystar-exec-s...
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    >Microsoft used a company called BayStar to fund SCO's lawsuits Your article suggests otherwise. It seems like some over-eager Microsoft exec promised that BayStar's investment would be 'guaranteed' by Microsoft. That exec was subsequently fired and nothing was formalized. BayStar ultimately lost money on SCO. But even that much is suspect as this account is hearsay and comes from a managing member of BayStar who has cause to deflect blame for his or his company's dumb investment in SCO.
    - msla 7y ago
      Maybe I assume too much skulduggery on the part of Ballmer-era "THE GPL IS CANCER! LINUX IS CANCER!" Microsoft when it comes to something which attempts to hurt Linux.
      - macspoofing 7y ago
        >Maybe I assume too much skulduggery Yes. Just because you don't like Microsoft, doesn't mean you can just claim things that are untrue.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      MS claimed to have changed their minds, but it's hard to say what really went on there. Due to the nature of the whole enterprise people would be very conscious of what to put on paper / email. It seems plausible that the SVP was just paid a lot of money to quit and not refute the blame placed on him after the rest of MS decided to wash their hands. (And in any event, actions by the responsible executives are actions of the company, and going back to say "it was just this guy, not MS the company" is not really the right way to think about it)
      - macspoofing 7y ago
        Again, you're taking the words of a BayStar managing member at face value. Why? He has a reason to lie and deflect blame. There is no other supporting evidence. Nothing else rings true about his story either. Like for example, you don't make a big investment as private equity firm based on flimsy (at best) guarantees. Regardless, had that guarantee actually happened and BayStar really believed it, they would have sued Microsoft just to embarrass them and force a settlement. I'm sure Microsoft was applauding the lawsuit but that doesn't mean they funded it as OP just outright stated. > It seems plausible that the SVP was just paid a lot of money to quit and not refute the blame placed on him after the rest of MS decided to wash their hands. Only if you're conspiratorial minded because that doesn't seem plausible at all. I think your dislike of Microsoft clouds your judgment.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    It's just a little more complicated than that. If you're interested in what really happened, go to http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20080803065719599 http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2008080306... and explore the actual decade plus story.
    - msla 7y ago
      I was reading Groklaw at the time, but not closely enough to be able to summarize the entire thing in a single Hacker News post without simplifying.
      - kjs3 7y ago
        Choosing one debatable point out of a decade plus of litigation involving a dozen entities, millions of pages of legal fillings, untold legal rulings, and declaring "this summarizes the whole thing" is in the best possible case a dubious conclusion. In this case it's ridiculous.

cowmix 7y ago

Coherent was a great option in and around the 1990-92 timeframe. It was a great UNIX clone for $99 (with a great manual to boot). What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack. It would have been the perfect Internet OS.

anyfoo 7y ago
Just from memory, I can sort of see how they could have mistaken those priorities. Windowing systems (with which X11 was synonymous on unixy systems) were a big deal at the time, while TCP/IP, even networking in general, was still emerging in what probably was Coherent's target market. Coherent did have UUCP, didn't it? In a lot of cases, that got you much further in small to mid scale environments than TCP/IP. I wouldn't even be surprised if Novell Netware would have been considered more important.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  > I wouldn't even be surprised if Novell Netware would have been considered more important. Speaking as a field engineer from the UK from days of yore... Up until around 1995 IPX/SPX, Novell's default networking stack at that time, was hugely prevalent in corporate and governmental environments. I didn't start bumping into TCP/IP in any serious way until around 1992 in my job as a field engineer. The general kinda setup was groups of departmental Novell Netware 386 servers (I was a Netware engineer since around '87) with loads of DOS and Windows 2/3.x clients running Novell's IPX/SPX stack atop NE2000 compatible NIC's. Around '95 things changed. Novell Netware 4 (as did NT 3.51 - NT done properly) shipped and the default stack became TCP/IP...the rest is history.
  - Jaruzel 7y ago
    I think people forget how prevalent IPX/SPX and Netware was back in the late 80s-early 90s. Fun anecdote: I used to work on a large MoD site as PC support during that era, and one call I got was to visit a bunch of porta-cabins to fix their Netware network because they wanted to play network DOOM and for some reason it wasn't working.

anyfoo 7y ago

This is only based on playing around with it in a VM and poking at its source code after it was open sourced with a BSD license in 2015, but to me, Coherent seemed like a quite well put together system. Enough that it made me a bit sad that it's now an OS of the past.

simonblack 7y ago
Coherent's misfortune was that it was released at the same time that Linux was. All through the 90s as I progressed from Coherent to AT&T Unix to Novell's Unixware to Sun's Solaris, I used to to look at Linux every six months or so. I was always gobsmacked at how quickly Linux (actually Gnu/Linux) was moving ahead in leaps and bounds. By the time that 2001 rolled around, it was time for me to put away my Solaris and switch to Linux fulltime.
- ecksii 7y ago
  While Linux would have certainly killed Coherent eventually, that's not quite the case. First Coherent was out long before Linux. Coh was around long enough for AT&T to have sent Dennis Ritchie to Chicago to inspect the code and evaluate it for copyright claims. Coherent ran on the PDP11 and on the 80286. Linux became a real force in the Unix market around 1998. MWC went out of business in Feb 1995. The first round of layoffs at MWC happened in Oct, 1994. A perfect storm of several things killed Coherent The two biggest problems were: The customers dinging Mark Williams Company in the newsgroup mainly complained about the lack of TCP/IP networking. This happened because MWC had done a customer pole to see what big feature should come next? TCP/IP or X11. X11 won. The real or perceived drop in quality of the product. This one is hard to explain. Coherent 3.10 and 4.0 had been solid V7 Unix clones with V7 sensibilities. When 4.2.05 shipped it included a really nasty disk driver bug that basically destroyed your file system beyond the ability of fsck to fix. The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode. This mode was rare or hadn't existed during the days of MFM/RLL/ESDI drives but became common with ATA drives especially as the market got flooded with cheap 504MB drives. While the bug was fixed somewhere between 4.2.10 and 4.2.14, the damage to Coherent's reputation was done.

teh_klev 7y ago

Back in the day (early 1991) just before Linux appeared I convinced my company to pay for a copy of Coherent and they agreed. It was $99 and I learned a decent amount of Unixy basics on my el-cheapo clone 386 PC. In summary it was a pretty decent learning tool. I managed to get it to connect to my ISP and get some basic text based internet kinda things done. I eventually filched a copy of SCO Unix from a customer (which is what I had to support way back then - along with SCO Xenix) with a license key and ran that for a bit and once Linux became a bit more stable (for me it was Slackware circa 1994/1995) I started running that instead. I kinda wonder what would have happened if MWC had open sourced Coherent back then (provided they owned all their own code, or the third party code was compatible with GPL/MIT/et-al)?

EvanAnderson 7y ago

Fun fact - The Mark Williams Company[1], who made Coherent, was founded by Aaron Schwartz father, Robert Schwartz [2]. A couple of friends and I drooled over an AT&T Unix manual that our public library had in 1990 - 1991. Unix seemed really cool but we could never afford a real Unix machine. We talked about pooling our money and buying a copy of Coherent but we never did. Then Linux came on the scene and Coherent was forgotten. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

simonblack 7y ago

Coherent was my entrance to the wonderful world of Unix back in 1991. Thanks to Coherent's introduction I never ever had to endure Windows as my everyday personal desktop environment.

tyingq 7y ago

I remember the magazine ads for it: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzVzVxKynE/To2Hu97jlLI/AAAAAAAAAD8/oo15jOBz0JY/s1600/Coherent+4.0+OS+32-bit+which+runs+on+80386+and+80486+machine+advert.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzVzVxKynE/To2Hu97jlLI/AAAAAAAAAD...

icedchai 7y ago

I ran this on a 386SX for while in 1991. It came with a very comprehensive "Unix" manual. A couple years later I switched to Linux...

Foroldhack44 7y ago

in 1990, while working for an insurance company, we were looking for what UNIX to port a multi user database to, We looked at SCO, Microport, Cohernet and Sperry. The company chose Microport, and the Sperry went back, so I got to keep SCO and Coherent. Loaded and ran both, liked SCO a tiny bit more because of it successfully compiling a few programs, and heard about the UNIX Copyright controversy. Coherent installed, and ran, but had a few incompatibilities with our software, but ran solid as hell. The documentation was very good too.

wstrange 7y ago

This brings back a lot of memories. I was an intern an Inetco sytems in Vancouver (circa 1989?). They developed switching software for ATMs that used Coherent running on Intel PCs. My task was to extend the Coherent shell (a clone of the standard Unix sh) with BSD csh features (history, etc.). I had nothing to go on except the csh man page. I have since lost the source code (it was called the "wsh"), but I suspect I would cringe looking at it now. Coherent was definitely my gateway drug into Unix.

bifrost 7y ago

I remember using Coherent along with Xenix around the same time. I think I tried everything I could get my hands on :) I even used 386BSD heh.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

Almost bought it after seeing the stunningly low price. $99 for a Unix like OS? It seemed too good to be true. At the time my housemate and I ran a small multiline BBS we wanted to make into something bigger. Coherent would have been to run Picospan after seeing how well M-Net worked. Someone we contacted at the Mark Williams Company said they didn't think Picospan would work with Coherent's memory model. No idea if that was correct but we went with MajorBBS instead for our big upgrade. Still thought about buying it to play with but Linux showed up before I had the spare money for Coherent.

nineteen999 7y ago

These days (as another poster has already pointed out) it is under an Open Source license. The author of this page: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/index.html https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/index.html previously worked for MWC and has put some quite detailed notes on setting up various aspects of Coherent running under Virtualbox there.

nils-m-holm 7y ago

In case somebody did not know yet: Coherent is officially free software now. You can download disk images with the whole system, including full, self-replicting source code, here: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/vms/ https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/vms/ Udo's Coherent pages in general are worth a visit: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/

luismedel 7y ago

I met about Coherent thanks a small article in the spanish edition of ComputerWorld[1]. I was 13 y/o and all my computer knowledge was about Basic, Pacal, DOS and Win3.1. Good times. I still remember the accompanying picture in the article, showing the windowing system with an astronaut picture in a window, some terminals and a file explorer. I think that picture inspired my view of what operating systems should be, more than everything I've seen since then. Also, I recently stumbled upon Idris[2], which, as far as I know, predates Xenix and Coherent in the PC scene. [1] https://www.computerworld.es/archive/omega-anuncia-coherent-un-clonico-de-unix-de-bajo-precio-y-facilidad-de-uso https://www.computerworld.es/archive/omega-anuncia-coherent-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(operating_system)

tass 7y ago

My dad (or maybe his work) bought Coherent for him to learn UNIX and we had a setup in the garage with serially-connected VT100-like terminals. It was my only time knowingly using a UNIX-like OS until a few years later when I installed Slackware.

MarkMMullin 7y ago

Ran this on the Ithaca Intersystems Z-8000 based rig in the early/mid '80s - it was remarkably command compatible with V7 for the basics, even built a MicroAngelo based 3D graphics system on it.....the biggest problem the box had wasn't Coherent, it was the fact the socketed logic on the custom MMU S100 card kept trying to walk out of the sockets because of thermal issues