[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Tue Jan 6 12:23:58 AEST 2015


Bob Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, has allowed the sources for
COHERENT to be published under a three-clause BSD license.  Steve Ness is
hosting them.  They are available here:

    http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php

For reference, for folks who don't know what COHERENT is, it started as a
clone of 7th Edition, but grew more modern features over time.  Dennis
Ritchie's recollections of his interaction with it:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4/5B41Uym6d4QJ

And of course the requisite Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

        - Dan C.

PS: I hold a soft spot for COHERENT in my heart.  I became interested in
Unix in high school, but this was before Linux was really a thing and
access to other systems was still hard to come by.  I spotted an ad for
COHERENT in the back of one of the PC-oriented publications at the time,
"Computer Shopper" or some such, and realized that it was *almost* within
my reach financially and that I could install it on the computer I already
owned.  Over the next month or so, I scraped up enough money to buy a copy,
did so, and put it on my PC.  It was quirky compared to actual Unix
distributions, but it was enough to give one a flavor for things.  The
manual, in particular, did not follow the traditional Unix format, but
rather was an alphabetical "lexicon" of commands, system calls and
functions and was (I've always thought) particularly well done.  Links to
the COHERENT lexicon and various other documents:
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/.

I graduated onto other systems rather quickly, but COHERENT served as my
introduction to Unix and Unix-like systems.

PPS: Bob Swartz is the father of the late Aaron Swartz.
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