How the Linux-vs-BSD culture clash looked in the 1980s/1990s

[withaveeay@mastodon.scot]

@lproven Oh yes, I couldn't remember the name of that Mark Williams Corporation product - Coherent. I really wanted to explore its potential, but my boss wouldn't spring the £99* for it, saying I could have a login on the Sequent running Dynix/ptx instead. But I thought that "unix" on commodity hardware for general purpose use, as you note, had a future.
* - I'm sure it was available in the UK at the time, at the usual £-$ equivalence

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@withaveeay I have fond memories of Coherent, which made me grok Unix.

I got it in Italy by mail order and installed it on a 386 laptop with 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard disk, half for Coherent and the rest for DR-DOS which shipped with the machine. Coherent was fantastic, for fun I even used my Amiga 500 as a serial terminal connected to the laptop via RS-232.

@lproven

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@amoroso @withaveeay Nice!

I only got to do this sort of thing at work. I did have UUCP delivering emails (from me to me, of course) over RS232 between my own Xenix 286 machine and the big Xenix 386 machine we used for customer demo purposes. That was as close as I got.

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@amoroso @withaveeay The slightly sad thing is that I believe only the final 386 version of Coherent was made FOSS. I am not sure if the earlier 8086 and 80286 versions survived at all.

The 286 one was apparently very capable and did even more than Xenix within the tiny 64 kB process size limit the processor imposed.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@lproven With that Coherent setup I also used UUCP over dial-up to send email via an Italian provider connected to an Internet gateway at Rutgers University. My paid plan carried Usenet too but I never used it.

I was living in the future. I recall a Computer Science professor at the university I was a student at impressed by a mail I sent him.

@withaveeay

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@lproven Maybe Stephen Ness knows more. He worked at MWC also on Coherent, for example the excellent manual. I exchanged a few mails with him.

https://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc

@withaveeay

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@lproven The Elm email client ran perfectly on Coherent. I also easily ported XScheme by David Betz.

@withaveeay

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@lproven Here it is, I got UUCP access from Sublink Network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublink_Network

@withaveeay

[fedops@fosstodon.org]

@amoroso I saw the Coherent add in Byte magazine and wanted to buy it. At the time I didn't have the money for the product plus import duties, and a friend had a pirated copy of Sco Xenix which I then used instead and invested the money into a System V book. 😄

I set up uucp to poll my Fidonet mailbox, that was "interesting". Landed a student job at university a short while later where I downloaded Linux 0.95 and haven't looked back since.

@lproven @withaveeay

[lproven@social.vivaldi.net]

@amoroso @withaveeay #

When I read "here it is" I got all excited and thought you meant Coherent 1 or 2 or 3... 😢

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@fedops UUCP interoperated with FidoNet? Interesting.

@lproven @withaveeay

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@lproven Well, my copy of Coherent was version 3.3 for 286 and higher systems but the floppies are now little more than molecules in some landfill. And yes, I wasn't yet aware of the historical significance of such artifacts. If you're interested I can email Stephen Ness.

@withaveeay