[TUHS] The Mark Williams Company and Coherent

[Dan Cross]

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

COHERENT (version 4) was my introduction to Unix (or Unix-like)
systems. I bought it from an ad in the back of "Computer Shopper" or
one of those things; my first inkling that it was rather different
from actual Unix was that the `lc` command they had picked up
(probably from York or Toronto) was not present on SunOS or 4.3BSD.
Similarly, the manual was rather different: it didn't have the usual
sectioned Unix manual, but rather an alphabetical "Lexicon" and
chapters discussing specific topics (editors, UUCP, etc); in
retrospect I thought their manual and its format was rather nice; it
was certainly well-written and beautifully typeset. Regardless of
that, I pretty quickly left COHERENT behind for NetBSD.

COHERENT was an early casualty of Linux's success, and I don't think
it ever occupied much more than a niche, but it was an interesting
system. I've booted it a few times under emulation out of nostalgia.

I had a very small hand in the opening of their sources. I knew that
Stephen Ness had archived copies, at the request of Bob Swartz, and I
wrote to him about the system overall and ended with something like,
"if those sources are available, I'd love to see them."  He responded
that due to my message, he'd corresponded with Swartz, who had agreed
to release the sources under the 3 clause BSD license.

Incidentally, Robert Swartz was the father of the late Aaron Swartz.

        - Dan C.

> On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 4:16 PM Heinz Lycklama <heinz at osta.com> wrote:
>>
>> Interesting little history about Coherent. They were
>> one of a few companies building UNIX-like systems
>> from scratch without using UNIX source code in the
>> early 1980's. Robert Schwartz represented the Mark
>> Williams Company on the /usr/group standards
>> effort resulting in the /usr/group Standard in 1984.
>> Robert was very insistent that members of the
>> /usr/group standards group did not have to be
>> UNIX source licensees.
>>
>> Heinz
>>
>> On 3/14/2024 8:45 PM, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>> > In another thread there's been some discussion of Coherent. I just
>> > came across this very detailed history, just posted last month.
>> > There's much more to it than I knew.
>> >
>> > https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-mark-williams-company
>> >
>> > Marc
>> >
>>