19 karma · joined October 23, 2013
PC hardware was all over the map in those days. I didn't remember this bug being tied to cabling but I only worked it to the point where we recognized that the cause was not handling an error in multi-sector transfers correctly. I do remember putting Scatter/Gather handling into the SCSI driver so that SCSI drives could do the same multi-sector trick. I also dimly remember that Louis Gilberto had to patch my driver for a bug afterwards and Hal said that he didn't have kind words for me.
A perfect storm of several things killed Coherent The two biggest problems were:
The customers dinging Mark Williams Company in the newsgroup mainly complained about the lack of TCP/IP networking. This happened because MWC had done a customer pole to see what big feature should come next? TCP/IP or X11. X11 won.
The real or perceived drop in quality of the product. This one is hard to explain. Coherent 3.10 and 4.0 had been solid V7 Unix clones with V7 sensibilities. When 4.2.05 shipped it included a really nasty disk driver bug that basically destroyed your file system beyond the ability of fsck to fix. The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode. This mode was rare or hadn't existed during the days of MFM/RLL/ESDI drives but became common with ATA drives especially as the market got flooded with cheap 504MB drives. While the bug was fixed somewhere between 4.2.10 and 4.2.14, the damage to Coherent's reputation was done.
I played league darts for about twenty years in the U.S. I had the privilege of knowing the First and Second ranked woman darters in the U.S. ten years ago. Either of them could tell you about games where they frustrated a male opponent who thought he was "just playing a girl".
To reverse that opinion I'd have to meet a Female darter who practiced as much as the highly skilled Male darters I know and still had a lower point-per-dart average. But in the US, that's not likely because everyone starts in league darts. league darts can be a "boys only club" depending on your team so the nature of the lower levels can be a little off-putting for woman.