Anyone used Coherent?

[Tom Betz]

Quoth lord at se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dave Lord) in <3023 at se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>:
|I am looking at an ad for Coherent from Mark Williams which claims to
|be a 'virtual clone of Unix' and offers some advantages over Unix,
|notably it uses less disk, memory, is easier to install, easier to learn,
|and best of all, costs only $100 dollars. So the question of course,
|does this really look like Unix? Which Unix? What is it missing, or
|what works differently? Does it include 'curses' how about the
|'regexp' and 'regex' routines. Will stuff I write for Coherent
|("C" and shell scripts) run on Unix and versa? Who killed Laura Palmer?

Well, I can't answer the last question, but here's a posting from
a guy who just LOVES Coherent.

Maybe this will answer some of your questions:



  =======================================================================
  Date: 06-06-90 (00:00)           Number: 2092      The Executive Network 
    To: ALL                        Refer#: NONE
  From: CHRIS SMITH                  Read: YES
  Subj: COHERENT                     Conf: (41) Unix
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  After what seemed to be forever, and a few screwups by the company that
  Mark Williams hired to do their shipping, COHERENT finally arrived.
  I'm absolutely thrilled with the package.  There's gonna be dancing int
  the streets in Stone Mountain 2nite.  If there's any difference between
  COHERENT and SYSV, I haven't found it yet.  It installed like a breeze.
  All of the commands, man pages and all rattled around like a bee-bee in
  a box car in the 12 meg root fs we gave it.  Gave it another 13 for a
  /u filesystem (what will we ever do with _all_ that storage.  We
  ordered 6 copies so that everybody in our office could at least have a
  book.  And what a book!!! Well organized, descriptions of everything.
  The C library is COMPLETE.  Believe me.  I've had it up to here with
  the incomplete Xenix library.  I even had to write movmem, memmov in
  assembler for Xenix.  I can't find anything missing in the COHERENT
  libraries.  It has a complete implementation of termcap and curses.
  What really blew my mind was the microemacs editor included.  I've been
  using the public domain microemacs.  The public domain is a resource
  hog, even using nice -30.  This guy is bocoup quick.  But that's not
  even the best!!!  If you're writing a program and you cant remember
  what params to pas a function, or where it's header is, just hit ctl-x
  ? and enter the name of the function.  Or put the cursor under it and
  hit meta-x.  Zot!!! up comes the info.  Thats still not all!!! call cc
  with a -A flag, and when it gets done compiling, if there are errors
  (aren't there always?), it calls microemacs and highlights the first
  error.  There are keys to bounce forward and backward through all the
  errors.  There are apologies for the incomplete implementation of
  microemacs.  I don't think any apologies are necessary.
  So, today, I say goodbye to Xenix.  No more incomplete libraries.  No
  more flaky microsoft compilers.  No more picky kernel that won't let me
  use my super gee-golly MDA-CGA-EGA-VGA board.  No more guessing at
  commands format (as opposed to weeding through 12 hugmoungous books).
  bye-bye microsoft...... forever
  regards,
  chris
  
  ---
    EZ 1.27 #849 -- And it's only 100 buck$

-- 
"I don't run - I tend to black my eyes." - D.Parton | hombre!marob!upaya!tbetz
----------------------------------------------------|    tbetz at dasys1.UUCP
"The conventional view serves to protect us         |      Tom Betz - GBS
from the painful job of thinking." - J.K. Galbraith |      (914) 375-1510