Coherent was interesting because it emerged as an interesting answer for getting true multitasking, multi-user performance out of 386 machines that wasn't pric

Coherent was interesting because it emerged as an interesting answer for getting true multitasking, multi-user performance out of 386 machines that wasn't priced ridiculously high. Coherent's tool chain wasn't as good as SCO's and that meant a lot of work for porting. There wasn't a lot of software ported to it (i.e. databases, etc...) so you were pretty much writing the whole application on Coherent. If you were writing a greenfield application, coherent wasn't bad and was priced really nicely (at the time). Incidentally, the problem with Unix at the time was the crazy license costs for SCO and Xenix. The lower cost alternatives were weird "multiplexed dos" operating systems like Concurrent DOS and the multiuser version of DR DOS.