3 ms·

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 a

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

neilv 3y ago
I didn't know the company was founded by Robert Swartz. I'd always see the magazine ads for Mark Williams C, and just ssumed that it was written by a programmer named Mark Williams who made a company.
sedatk 3y ago
Another fun fact: One of the Coherent's authors was Tom Duff (of Duff's Device fame) apparently.
- nigel_bree 3y ago
  Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university - their computing department is responsible for a great many notable products.
pjmlp 3y ago
I went to a technical highschool with focus on informatic, so for our operating systems class the introduction to UNIX was done via Xenix. It was a PC tower, that the teacher would rent from his work once a week. Given the timeframe, we would split in groups, having prepared our samples as best as we could in Turbo C for MS-DOS, with dummy implementations for the UNIX calls not available on MS-DOS. Then we would take 15m turns, to try to make our applications run in Xenix with the actual real implementations, instead of the stubs. Current generations have no idea how expensive it was to get into computers.
- nigel_bree 3y ago
  Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components made for a whole generation of quite exceptional "frugal" engineers. UNIX itself was - despite being in the US - born out of a similar level of necessity. One thing about Coherent (and why I periodically fiddle about with implementing replacement, modernized kernel designs for it, albeit not in C) is that exactly like V6 UNIX it is an exercise in that kind of design, but being for the x86 and partially modernised to an early-90's level it's considerably more accessible than V6 to anyone who wants to look at the source code today to learn about that.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  That sounds incredible tedious, but probably a lot of fun too. The best my high school had was Apple IIe's, BASIC, and a couple Mac LC's. I wish I'd had a more experienced mentor in those days. It took me a much longer time to cobble together basic comp-sci knowledge fiddling around on my own. I ended up getting access to XENIX, too. It was thru a public access system but it was a long distance phone call. That put a damper on too much experimentation. They also didn't have a C compiler (or, if they did, I couldn't figure out how to use it).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    This was at the technical level, during the last three high school levels (10 - 12), where one is expected to finalize with an internship in a company instead of going straight into the university. Job related stuff is intermixed with traditional highschool content. However that does not prevent applying to the university later on, many people go through this route in European countries where it is available, just in case.

neilv 3y ago

I didn't know the company was founded by Robert Swartz. I'd always see the magazine ads for Mark Williams C, and just ssumed that it was written by a programmer named Mark Williams who made a company.

sedatk 3y ago

Another fun fact: One of the Coherent's authors was Tom Duff (of Duff's Device fame) apparently.

nigel_bree 3y ago
Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university - their computing department is responsible for a great many notable products.

pjmlp 3y ago

I went to a technical highschool with focus on informatic, so for our operating systems class the introduction to UNIX was done via Xenix. It was a PC tower, that the teacher would rent from his work once a week. Given the timeframe, we would split in groups, having prepared our samples as best as we could in Turbo C for MS-DOS, with dummy implementations for the UNIX calls not available on MS-DOS. Then we would take 15m turns, to try to make our applications run in Xenix with the actual real implementations, instead of the stubs. Current generations have no idea how expensive it was to get into computers.

nigel_bree 3y ago
Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components made for a whole generation of quite exceptional "frugal" engineers. UNIX itself was - despite being in the US - born out of a similar level of necessity. One thing about Coherent (and why I periodically fiddle about with implementing replacement, modernized kernel designs for it, albeit not in C) is that exactly like V6 UNIX it is an exercise in that kind of design, but being for the x86 and partially modernised to an early-90's level it's considerably more accessible than V6 to anyone who wants to look at the source code today to learn about that.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
That sounds incredible tedious, but probably a lot of fun too. The best my high school had was Apple IIe's, BASIC, and a couple Mac LC's. I wish I'd had a more experienced mentor in those days. It took me a much longer time to cobble together basic comp-sci knowledge fiddling around on my own. I ended up getting access to XENIX, too. It was thru a public access system but it was a long distance phone call. That put a damper on too much experimentation. They also didn't have a C compiler (or, if they did, I couldn't figure out how to use it).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  This was at the technical level, during the last three high school levels (10 - 12), where one is expected to finalize with an internship in a company instead of going straight into the university. Job related stuff is intermixed with traditional highschool content. However that does not prevent applying to the university later on, many people go through this route in European countries where it is available, just in case.