soulard@fantasio.inria.fr (Herve Soulard) (11/22/90)
Hello, The first time I saw an advertising about Coherent in France was yesterday. Of course they say it's marvellous. And know I see a discussion about this product. Any ideas about Coherent, its fonctionnality, powerful, etc... ? Herve Soulard. PS: does it really work multi-... on a 286 ?
news@bartek1.uucp (11/26/90)
In article <1764@seti.inria.fr> soulard@fantasio.inria.fr (Herve Soulard) writes: > The first time I saw an advertising about Coherent in France was > yesterday. > Of course they say it's marvellous. > And know I see a discussion about this product. > Any ideas about Coherent, its fonctionnality, powerful, etc... ? > Herve Soulard. >PS: does it really work multi-... on a 286 ? Yes, it DOES work multi-user on 286/386/486 100% AT compatible systems (no support for XT's any more -- so sorry :-( COHERENT is a V7 clone that was written entirely by Mark Williams Company back around 1980 for PDP-11's, 8086's, 68000's, Z8000's, etc. More recently, it was ported to the higher numbered 80x86 family parts and repackaged somewhat. To clear up some of the misinformation that has been posted here recently (as well as stale magazine reviews based upon the initial 3.0.0 release from 7 months ago), Coherent DOES support SCSI as well as dumb multi-port serial cards, COM3, COM4, MFM/RLL/ESDI/IDE (as long as they are IBM/WD timing/reg compatible). The current release is 3.1.0 and includes a driver for the Adaptec AHA-154x SCSI series (just like SCO, for example). More host adapters are being worked on including the Western Digitial WD7000-FASST, Future Domain, etc. COHERENT costs $99.95 in the U.S. and comes with free tech support. The optional device driver kit costs about $40 and includes full source code for quite a few drivers, as well as the unlinked kernel objects needed to link a custom system. Unlike SCO/Interactive/ESIX, you can write drivers and invoke them at run time, so you don't even need to reboot to bring in support for most of the devices. If you run an AT with an AT hard disk controller, (WD1006-VSR2 RLL in my case), you can fire up the driver for the Adaptec SCSI while the system is in multi-user mode (even though the driver isn't linked into the kernel on my system). The system comes with close to 200 commands including UUCP, C compiler, various libraries (curses, termcap, multi-precision, etc), lex, yacc, awk, etc. It also has on-line man pages, help, and a dictionary. It isn't the latest and greatest release of System V or Berserkeley (and doesn't claim to be). If you need V.4, you shouldn't be looking at a $100 product ;-) However, if you want to play with/learn UN*X or just want to get on the net for cheap, I can't see how you could go wrong for $100. Unlike the REAL UN*X suppliers, if you don't like COHERENT, MWC has a 60-day money-back offer. By the way, a 386 virtual memory release is in the works. Enuff said. -- norm -- -- No Habla .signature!