On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:16:40 EST, Innfogra(a)aol.com <Innfogra(a)aol.com> wrote: Coherent was a clean-room implementation of a Unix-Like system written by Mark Williams & Co. It was even "blessed" by AT&T as being non-infringing. It served my personal development needs quite well for several years until I managed to get a *real* AT&T SVR4 binary license.

At one point, there was a web site (in Europe, I believe) that had a complete archive of the Coherent distribution. Unfortunately, Coherent has very few drivers and those that exist don't play well with modern hardware. For example, Coherent's disk utility for setting up file systems absolutely has problems with drives of any reasonable size today (I had problems getting it to work with an 8 GB IDE drive, for example). Also, and I know this sounds picky, but it's not "Coherent Unix"... it's "Coherent". It has NO AT&T code in it. The Mark Williams Company wrote most of the code themselves, and eventually added support for X Windows before the company folded. Even the C compiler was theirs (and if I remember correctly, they had a great C compiler for Intel chips). When Coherent first came out, it cost something like $500... later, the price dropped to $99. Unfortunately for MWC, Coherent started becoming popular right about the time Linux took off, and it was kind of hard for them to compete. Because Coherent was a "look-alike", there were many programs used that were rather difficult to port to Coherent. I remember struggling to get UUCP working properly and having to bug MWC to fix problems so I could use Coherent for news exchange (this was back before NNTP). I had many happy months working with Coherent in those days (back when a "real" port of Unix would cost thousands of dollars), and was sorry to see it go. Mark Davidson On Jan 13, 2005, at 11:16 AM, Innfogra(a)aol.com wrote: