You just had to have been there. Sure Interactive made a better Unix than Coherent, but it required a 386. MINIX wasn't out quite yet. Apple's Unix required

You just had to have been there. Sure Interactive made a better Unix than Coherent, but it required a 386. MINIX wasn't out quite yet. Apple's Unix required an expensive Mac. 68k based workstations were expensive. I ran Coherent on a 286 I inherited. In this era people were accustomed to platforms offering slightly different Dev tools and capabilities. When you wanted an apple ii program to run on a c64, you had to PORT it. There was no java. There was no gcc. The STL was neither S, nor exclusively T or L. C compilers were often proprietary, written by companies making hardware. And had different takes on the language. The reason that C89 is called C89 is the standard was ratified in 1989, almost a decade after coherent was first released. In '89, paying $500 for Interactive/386 made sense. But in '85, you couldn't do that, so $100 for coherent on a 286 or even 8086 was a decent alternative.