Mark Williams Co of Northbrook, Illinois bills the 4.0 release of its Coherent Unixalike as the answer to an impecunious Unix-lover’s prayer, describing it as the first inexpensive, easy-to-use, 32-bit clone of Unix and smaller, faster, and less expensive than any other Unix operating system for the Personal Computer. The price is certainly impressive – just $100, and you don’t need to be an engineer to use it, according to the company. And the price includes unlimited free technical support, an unlimited user licence, and a 1,200 page manual. Coherent 4.0 is the successor to Coherent 3.2, which the company claims has sold over 40,000 copies its release in May 1990. New features is the ability to run COFF binaries that run on many other iAPX-86 Unix systems, such as Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Unix System V/386 3.2.2. Another piece of what sounds like good news is that the entire Coherent 4.0 consists of six floppy disks and installs in less than an hour. It is also claimed to outrun the competition, outperforming Santa Cruz Unix V/386 almost three to one on a 25MHz 80486 box running the Byte C Compiler Benchmark. It come with program development, text processing, communications and administrative tools and runs on 80386 and 80486 AT-alikes with 1Mb memory – and up to 64Mb. It supports SCSI adaptors from Adaptec Inc, Seagate Technology Corp, and Future Domain Inc, are IDE, RLL, MFM, ESDI and Perstor disk controllers and mono CGA, EGA, Hercules and VGA displays.
