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Mark Williams Company Sources

nesssoftware.com

29 pointstokenrove6 comments

In case you're wondering, Bob Swartz is aaronsw's dad.

If you ever want to write a manual, have a look here:

http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php

It was by far the best book available at the time, and my copy outlasted the use of the software by a decade (and then it fell apart!).

I agree. My company bought me a copy of Coherent back around 1992 so I could brush up on finding my way around Unix because we took a bunch of SCO Unix boxes on maintenance contract (I was a field engineer). The manual was top notch, I think I might have mine in a box somewhere.

I was reminiscing about Coherent today and, lo and behold, it had been open sourced just a few weeks ago! I always felt it was a cool little operating system, even if it was in essence just a clone.

re: being a clone - Not at all dissimilar to Linux. >smile<

Years ago a couple of friends and I huddled around a System V Unix manual at our public library and discussed how exciting it would be to actually have a Unix machine we could use. I remember seeing an ad for Coherent in a magazine for, if memory serves, $99.00, and hatching a scheme to get my friends to pitch in with me and buy it so that we could have that Unix machine we wanted. (The plan ended up falling apart, sadly...)

Maybe now I'll actually take some time to play with it. Could be a good use of the old 286 I've been hanging on to.

I got a lot of mileage out of Coherent, and learned a lot of tricks and stuff about "user level unix" that I use to this day.

I was talking to a friend about it a few weeks ago as one of the nicest Unix systems out there. It would make a great teaching tool since it was very well documented.

I tried to run it in a VM with not much success, it was very slow. Wonder if some bright coder will figure out how to get it run in a VM.

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