) (03/29/90)
In recent issue of Byte there is an ad of Mark William Co (they made the Mark William C for the ST) for their product "Coherent", a unix clone for IBM for $99.95 (US). It includes everything you expects from a UNIX system, over 200 commands/utilities, lex, yacc, uucp, C complier, etc. Does anyone know if th`at will be ported to the ST?
mikew@wheeler.wrcr.unr.edu (Mike Whitbeck) (03/29/90)
In article <9365@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> cs161fca@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (Say no to core dump!) writes: | | |In recent issue of Byte there is an ad of Mark William Co (they |made the Mark William C for the ST) for their product "Coherent", a |unix clone for IBM for $99.95 (US). It includes everything you |expects from a UNIX system, over 200 commands/utilities, lex, yacc, |uucp, C complier, etc. Does anyone know if th`at will be ported to |the ST? Sounds like the toolkit that comes with their C compiler for the ST less the lex, yacc, uucp. They have long made software for Coherent systems and PC's ... Presumably they would port it to the ST if possible. ~ ___________________________________________________________ ~ |Mike Whitbeck | mikew@wheeler.wrc.unr.edu | ~ |__________________________|__RENO___NEVADA_______________|
steve@thelake.mn.org (Steve Yelvington) (03/29/90)
[In article <3787@tahoe.unr.edu>,
mikew@wheeler.wrcr.unr.edu (Mike Whitbeck) writes ... ]
> In article <9365@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> cs161fca@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (Say no to core dump!) writes:
> |
> |In recent issue of Byte there is an ad of Mark William Co (they
> |made the Mark William C for the ST) for their product "Coherent", a
> |unix clone for IBM for $99.95 (US). It includes everything you
> |expects from a UNIX system, over 200 commands/utilities, lex, yacc,
> |uucp, C complier, etc. Does anyone know if that will be ported to
> |the ST?
>
> Sounds like the toolkit that comes with their C compiler for the
> ST less the lex, yacc, uucp. They have long made software for
> Coherent systems and PC's ...
>
> Presumably they would port it to the ST if possible.
>
Coherent is a complete multitasking Unix-like operating system, not a
toolkit that runs on top of an existing operating system. It looks to me
as if it's being positioned as a more reliable alternative than Minix and
a less expensive option than Xenix and the "real Unixes."
$99.95 is a darned reasonable price, and a big cut from the $495 they used
to charge. If Idris or the complete version of OS/9 had been marketed for
the ST at that level, they might actually have sold a few copies.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for an ST port of Coherent. I
expect the Mark Williams Co. has better things to do than write oddball
early-1980s-style software for an unadvertised, erratically marketed and
usually unavailable computer.
--
Steve Yelvington at the lake in Minnesota
steve@thelake.mn.org jmberkey@watnow.waterloo.edu (J. Michael Berkley) (03/30/90)
> On 29 Mar 90 01:56:58 GMT, mikew@wheeler.wrcr.unr.edu (Mike Whitbeck) said: In article <9365@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> cs161fca@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (Say no to core dump!) writes: > |In recent issue of Byte there is an ad of Mark William Co (they > |made the Mark William C for the ST) for their product "Coherent", a > |unix clone for IBM for $99.95 (US). MW> Sounds like the toolkit that comes with their C compiler for the MW> ST less the lex, yacc, uucp. They have long made software for MW> Coherent systems and PC's ... Nope, Coherent is a real Unix clone. Not as fast as QNX, but much, much more Unix like. I don't think MWC was planning a port to the Atari. Mike Berkley, University of Waterloo PAMI Lab jmberkey@watnow.waterloo.edu {utai,uunet}!watmath!watnow!jmberkey
rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander) (03/30/90)
mikew@wheeler.wrcr.unr.edu (Mike Whitbeck) writes: > cs161fca@sdcc10.ucsd.edu writes: > > made the Mark William C for the ST) for their product "Coherent", a [...] > > Does anyone know if that will be ported to the ST? > Presumably they would port it to the ST if possible. A long time ago (at least 18 months) I remember Daniel Glasser, at that time an MWC employee [I believe; corrections solicited] mentioning that MWC had ported Coherent to a slightly-modified 1040. The mods involved building a little MMU (the chip Atari calls an MMU is more of a memory controller than a memory _manager_) from MSI logic to enforce interprocess memory protection and to do dynamic relocation (i.e., every user task believes it has memory starting @ 0 or some other small fixed value, and can't write to system or other process memory spaces). I believe they decided that the product wasn't marketable, which is sad since Minix-ST has shown how much hackers would like a small Un*x clone for the ST platform. Perhaps we could persuade MWC to release schematics and/or a board layout for their MMU? I would gladly pay two hundred dollars or so for one, if it gave me (say) base-and-limit registers for User I&D plus Super I&D - four base-and-limit pairs would be adequate. Another one or two or three to handle DMA accesses and/or interrupt vector fetches and/or video accesses would be nice but hardly nescessary. Daniel, are you still out there? Any chance of this? I'd settle for just a schematic. This would be lots of fun even without Coherent; MMU support could be stuck into Minix without too-too major surgery I think. It would be a lot of fun. BTW, I don't mind carving on my ST because I don't really care whether it runs or not. I am moving to a used Sun 3/50, and taking my SCSI peripherals with me, Uncle Jack can stick that in his "TTx" pipe and smoke it :-P. The TTx is two years late and 50% too slow, 16 MHz indeed. If Atari had just stuck to its knitting (designing, building, and marketing _computers_) instead of fiddling around in the LBO arena and getting *burned*, both they and we would be far better off IMHO. But hey, who ever listens to the customers? With luck, maybe MWC?! -- -- Ross Alexander (403) 675 6311 rwa@aungbad.AthabascaU.CA VE6PDQ