Coherent Unix

[Greg Limes]

In article <25088 at adm.brl.mil> I2010901%DBSTU1.BITNET at cunyvm.cuny.edu (Dipl.Phys. Thomas Wutzke) writes:
> In the last two months, a new version of Unix came up: COHERENT UNIX.
> Does anybody have any experiences with this Operating System? Or does
> someone know about the Hardware needed for this System?

I purchased Coherent shortly after version 3.0.0 was announced on the
net, and have been using it irregularly ever since (I am still porting
personal applications from MS-DOS, which will be removed from my hard
disk as soon as I can).

Coherent has been around for a good many years; I seem to remember
advertisements in '82 or '83, but recently there has been an upserge
in its visibility.

Overall, quite nice. A few attributes of Coherent:

  * It is a 7th Edition UNIX lookalike. Don't expect all the whizzies
    that you are accustomed to on your System V, Berkeley 4.3, SunOS,
    or other "modern" UNIX system.

  * It runs on a 80286 based PC/AT with one megabyte of ram. It may
    run on smaller systems; in fact, it probably does. But my one meg
    machine is enough.

  * It doesn't chew up a lot of disk. Ten meg seems to be sufficient
    for what I am doing right now (but I have allocated another
    twenty, which I expected to need long ago ...)

  * Programs are limited to 64k text and 64k data.

  * A hundred bucks will buy you Coherent. It will also buy you two
    decent pieces of decent MS-DOS game software.

  * A few more bucks get you a device driver development kit. Not for
    the faint of heart, but it makes a nifty break from hacking SunOS
    kernels at work :-)

Some bugs in 3.0.0 were found, and Coherent is now shipping 3.1.0; the
turnaround time between when the bugs were found and when shipping of
the release that has the fixes was quite swift.

Anyway, you need a 286 or 386 box (will 486 work? I dunno), with a meg
of memory (more might be nice), and a hard disk (ten meg is kinda the
minimum, again, more might be nice). EGA and VGA work (I have tried
'em). I expect just about any video would probably work, but avoid the
ones that can't do 80-column modes :-)

If you like playing games, keep MS-DOS around somewhere. There is
something to be said for huge installed bases.

DISCLAIMER 1, for everyone: My only relationship with Mark Williams
Co. is as a satisfied customer.

DISCLAIMER 2, for lawyers: I don't speak for Sun.

--
Greg Limes   limes at eng.sun.com
	"Just One More Bug Fix ..."