US software house Mark Williams Co, Lake Bluff, Illinois, has developed a chopped-down version of its Coherent Unixalike for MS-DOS personal computer users that are intrigued with Unix and would like to experiment with it – for less than $100. The new version of Coherent comes on five disks and a single manual, works in 640Kb of memory with 10Mb of disk and is reckoned to take 30 minutes to install. It supports read-write access to MS-DOS files on a shared system, and the multi-tasking, multi-user development system has a 64Kb kernel, a C compiler with lex and yacc utilities, Unix communications programs and 200 commands. The kernel is source-code compatible with Unix and means that many Unix programs can be compiled and run. As well as single users, Coherent is simed at schools, network sites needing electronic mail gateways to Unix, value-added resellers and personal computer support groups developing small multi-user applications. Out this month, the new version of Coherent costs $100.
