[TUHS] The Mark Williams Company and Coherent

[Marc Rochkind]

I have already posted this in another thread (on non-BTL C compilers), but
it's more relevant here. My 1985 review of Coherent for BYTE Magazine:

https://www.mrochkind.com/mrochkind/docs/Byte-Pick-Coherent-Theos.pdf

I see that I went into some detail. For example:

"Of the 77 requests in the Version 7 nroff. only 31 are present in Coherent
(the most useful 31. however)."

And this, although I'm sure there were incompatibilities I didn't uncover:

"Coherent has all the Version 7 system calls except nice (which sets a
process's priority). and they seem to be used in the same way. It should be
easy to port C programs between Coherent and UNIX Version 7."

On the whole my review was very positive.

Marc

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 7:43 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 9:03 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 3:00 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Another detail. There was lawyerly concern about the code being
> stolen, and we (127) were asked to find ways to test, absent their source,
> whether they had just stolen our source and built the binaries. It was soon
> concluded that there were enough details different to definitively say that
> at least most of the work was done in a clean room, as advertised, but the
> piece I liked best is that their PPT(1) program (ASCII art showing a paper
> tape rendering the argument text) did not include the original, and just
> discovered, bug that mispunched, if I remember right, the letter 'R'.
> >
> > Along those lines, Dennis Ritchie wrote up a summary of the event on
> > USENET; apparently in 1998 (I had no idea it was this late):
> >
> https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/_ZaYeY46eb4/m/5B41Uym6d4QJ
>
> Sorry, just to clarify: I meant I had no idea Dennis's posting about
> the event happened so late; by 1998 USENET was basically overrun by
> spam. Obviously, the inspection trip had happened much earlier.
>
>         - Dan C.
>


-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
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