
Coherent: Unix variant for DOS compatible PCs (1994) [pdf] - ColinWright
https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/COHERENT-4.2.pdf
======
ColinWright
From the Mastodon comment[0] where I found this:

 _" COHERENT was a UNIX variant for DOS compatible PCs and this is the 1409
page document that will teach you everything._

 _" This document assumes you've never used a computer much less UNIX and
walks you through installation, configuration, how logging in works, basic
usage, using text editors, basic and advanced administration, network
administrator and eventually topics including programming!_

 _" You walk in a baby and walk out a C programming UNIX wizard, all on your
286 with 2MB of ram."_

\-- penny, @penny@cute.science

[0]
[https://mathstodon.xyz/web/statuses/104720370803968311](https://mathstodon.xyz/web/statuses/104720370803968311)

~~~
1vuio0pswjnm7
Manuals:

[https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/](https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/)

------
humbledude
I can't overstate how great Coherent and this pale green book were. It was a
complete UNIX experience and taught me valuable skills that I use to this day.
The manual is probably the best organized and most comprehensive one that I've
seen for ANY software to this day. I still don't know how Mark Williams
Company pulled off this amazing feat with such limited resources. To anyone
who was involved with its production - thank you and much respect.

~~~
vmilner
Similar with me. I was loving using UNIX at work on Suns ~1991/2, but it
wasn't until I borrowed a PC with Coherent for a few weeks that I really was
able to explore it properly, both in the sense of being to work as root, and
having this excellent book. I was sad when I had to give the PC back, until
Linux hit the scene a little while later.

------
gdm85
I had never heard about this, but from the nicely written manual it looks like
a neat OS.

Since the source code is available I could not resist porting "lc" (List files
in categories and columns):
[https://github.com/gdm85/lc](https://github.com/gdm85/lc)

If you have nostalgia of that command you can now enjoy it on your modern
Linux!

~~~
lewiscollard
It's a command with my initials too, so how could I _not_ compile and install
this :) Thanks for doing this!

------
cowmix
Coherent made a fatal choice at the wrong time. Mark Williams Company started
to ramp up their marketing right before Linux really started to his. When they
had to make a choice to add either XWindows or a TCP/IP stack to Coherent,
they chose XWindows. Coherent could have been a great Internet OS at the dawn
of the commercialization of the Internet but they blew it.

~~~
justin66
If they'd chosen to skip X and create a TCP/IP stack, in the early-to-mid
nineties Unix battles they would have had to compete with Xenix, BSDI and the
other BSDs, and Solaris on x86. Not to mention Linux, the non-x86 options, and
whatever else I forgot.

In hindsight, it's not like there was some kind of very powerful move they
could have made.

~~~
cstross
Per memory, Coherent 4.0 showed up around 1992-3, with TCP/IP and pseudoTTYs.
X11 came along a little later. But by then it was too little too late: the
Linux distros were already eating their lunch.

Same with SCO. When I worked there circa 1991-95, the company lost $250 in
license fee payments to assorted other companies for every complete copy of
Open Desktop that they sold -- fees for the TCP/IP stack, the compiler, the
AT&T license, the Motif skin, CDE, the IXI desktop ... even purchasing IXI
didn't reduce it by much. They tried to go head-to-head with Windows NT as a
workstation OS on the desktop and nearly broke the company, then backed off to
focus on enterprise sales and support contracts. There was no way they could
compete with a solid Linux as a desktop option after the late 1990s. And SCO
was a _much_ larger and more powerful company than Mark Williams (by 1991 they
had about 1200 employees worldwide and $200M/year revenue -- going by memory).

~~~
justin66
That is wild. I didn't know SCO was ever losing money in quite that way.

I worked tech support for an early PC point of sale credit card payment
processing company and Linux was actually one of the last *nixes we supported.
I don't believe they had even rolled it out in 1998 when I quit. We supported
DOS, Windows, SCO, and maybe one other commercial Unix with just a few users.
It was excruciatingly obvious to the more knowledgeable rank and file where
things were going, and I even wrote an internal document once explaining how
to run the SCO version of our software on Linux using its iBCS support.

The internal discussion I remember about which operating system we would
support next as online payment processing took off was mostly about BSDI vs
Linux (but with our upper management focused very strongly on NT). Perhaps
oddly, both options were treated seriously.

~~~
cstross
SCO wasn't losing money on sales -- IIRC their cheapest product at the time
(bare-bones SysV 3.2 SCO UNIX) sold for upwards of $600 without the dev tools
or extras: Open Desktop retailed for a minimum of $1200 in its most pared-back
form -- but the $250 licensing fees put a floor under SCO that made it
impossible for them to compete as a desktop OS for the general public, as
opposed to enterprises that expected to spend $3000-4000 per seat on tech
support and licensing for every employee, every year.

------
homarp
previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200902)

now open sourced at
[http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php](http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php)

~~~
ColinWright
Fabulous ... thank you.

------
tyingq
An old magazine ad for Coherent. [https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2017/1...](https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Coherent-v3.0-ad.jpg)

------
jacquesm
Coherent was produced by the Mark Williams company, founded by Robert Swartz,
Aaron Swartz' father.

If you ever want to see what good documentation looks like go read the manuals
(linked elsewhere in this thread).

------
simonblack
Thank you Coherent. And thank you to all the guys/girls that used to work at
the Mark Williams Company.

Coherent opened my eyes to the world of UNIX. 30 years later, and I have never
yet used Windows as my every-day desktop.

------
nrclark
Advent of Computing did a great podcast about Coherent recently. For anybody
who's interested, I'd recommend checking it out:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coherent-is-not-
unix/i...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coherent-is-not-
unix/id1459202600?i=1000474914279)

------
Max-q
Coherent was the operating system running on the Commodore 900, that was
cancelled when Commodore bought Amiga Inc.

------
jhallenworld
We used Coherent- I remember it was much cheaper than SCO UNIX / Xenix (back
in the days when you had to pay $500 for the C compiler). Here's an ad showing
this:

[https://virtuallyfun.com/category/coherent/](https://virtuallyfun.com/category/coherent/)

The install time claim is interesting- I'm sure this comes down whether it
optimizes floppy drive reads (for example, read a track at a time).

------
unixhero
It is such a marvel of cosmic luck that Linus Torvalds could not afford to buy
this for his computer.

~~~
pjmlp
Even more luck that BSD was being sued, while Linus decided to use GPL.

~~~
dhosek
I was flirting with setting up my own server with bsd386 in the 90s. The main
thing stopping me was money: I had the offer of free rack space at my old
college's network but my income was low enough relative to the cost of
building a server (and a rackmount case) that I never pulled the trigger. My
20-something self would be envious of the amount of computing power I have
within arm's reach right now.

------
rbanffy
I remember one of the reviews, where the reviewer complained he couldn't get
uucp working between Coherent and a Unix box and he suggested it be called
"cccp" (Coherent to Coherent Copy Program) instead.

edit: s/could/couldn't/

~~~
ColinWright
Typo ...

 _Edit: Sorted._

~~~
rbanffy
Fixed that

------
icedchai
I used to run Coherent back when I was in high school. I ran it on a 386SX
with 3 megs of RAM (yes, odd number.) I later installed SLS Linux on that same
machine.

The Coherent documentation was amazing. I still remember that huge book...

------
vaxman
Instantly reminded me of Desqview, one of many systems murdered by Bill Gates’
dirty tricks while the government was asleep at the switch of an IBM 360.

------
bluedino
The page design of the book reminds me of the old WROX Press books

