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Comment by xarope | Hacker News Reader

I remember Coherent, it had a snail/nautilus logo, and came in a binder with a bunch of floppies. I bought it as I had a PC with a 286 (or maybe 386, but no separate FPU), 1MB of RAM (luxury, right?) and needed to get more familiar with unix, since we were using Sun x-terminals in college, and time on those was limited. Taught me to cpio/tar, gcc, vi make files etc.

For the princely sum of $99, I think? My 9600 baud modem cost $500 at the time.

- all pricing could be off by an order of magnitude, but I think I'm pretty close (!).

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Yep, I recall it being $99, but I thought mine came with a perfect-bind paperback book, probably with a nautilus shell on the cover. I bought it, but there was some showstopper for my needs, maybe that it only supported 64KB processes(?), so I returned it.

Today, our pocketbooks are spoiled by open source, few-dollar phone apps, and you're-the-product SaaSes. $99 (in decades-ago dollars) was often a bargain price for a lot of nontrivial PC software. That was also the price of Borland Sprint (cheaper than Wordperfect), and Borland Turbo Assembler&Debugger 1.0 bundle (Microsoft's assembler costs hundreds), both of which I bought while grossing $3.65/hr. As a teen, I briefly sold a simple program-launching menu program for MS-DOS for $24.95 (and about broke even, after packaging costs).

Yes, prior to 4.x processes were strictly limited to 64kb code and 64kb data - essentially the equivalent to what MS-DOS programmers would call the small memory model only. There are a bunch of reasons for this, all of which stem from the fact every part of Mark Williams C and the assembler/linker toolchain hewed so closely to the exact model set by V6 UNIX - including the same .o and .a formats, hence the same limitations all down the line.

Since so much my previous work before joining work on Coherent was on embedded toolchains and DOS development, the fact that so little use anywhere was made of x86 segmentation was surprising to me, but I knew all the V6 internals well enough to adapt back.

Even in 4.0 where the COFF and the iBCS2 syscalls all worked, actually most of the userland still stayed as 16-bit small model since the aim was to keep most of the installation process the same, which was that essentially the first install floppy was a reasonably full live system. Obviously things grew a ton and during the evolution of 4.0 we slowly had to move the bulk of the 32-bit userland components off to packages in later floppies.

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