The Mark Williams Co will release version 4.2 of its 32-bit Unix operating system clone for Intel Corp iAPX-86 personal computers in the next few weeks, and says it is aiming the product at the small business market. In the past, Coherent was sold mainly to personal users – individuals such as students that wanted to learn Unix, or to companies interested in using it as a training tool. The operating system could run only a very limited range of applications, but was cheap at $100 for an unlimited user licence. To date, Coherent has an installed base of 60,000 customers. The company says it has made improvements to the kernel, including code to support a maths co-processor and added floating point emulation. The Lake Bluff, Illinois-based company claims that Coherent now conforms to Intel Corp’s binary compatibility standard, IBCS 2, which means it can run shrink-wrapped Unix applications, such as Lotus Development Corp’s Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect Corp’s word processing package, native. The group has also added tape and print spooler support as well as a visual shell to simplify systems administration functions – such capabilities are intended to appeal to small business customers, needing systems for eight users and fewer. This market has traditionally been dominated by the Santa Cruz Operation Inc, but Mark Williams is convinced it can provide resellers with a cheaper alternative to SCO Open Desktop, which it doesn’t believe is right for everyone – it reckons that with Coherent, dealers can move one price bracket down and so make bigger margins. A Coherent licence for one to four users will cost UKP100, and an unlimited licence, UKP250 or $300. Customers can also buy the offering bundled with the X Window graphical user interface for UKP150. Open Look and Motif will also follow if their code comes into the public domain, but because Mark Williams says its main aim is to keep prices low, these options won’t be available until then. Nonetheless, the group doesn’t intend to stop here. Next, it wants to add networking capabilities to its product, but will do so in three stages. Over the next two to three months, Coherent will support serial IP protocols. This means personal users will be able to access such global networks as the Internet via a modem. In between three and five months time, customers will be able to hook Coherent up to an Ethernet network, so it can either operate as a file server or interact with other file servers. And in about six months, the firm will offer binary compatibility with various X Window versions of shrink-wrapped applications. Coherent is sold by Kingston-upon-Thames-based distributor Microway Ltd in the UK, and via mail order catalogues and resellers elsewhere.
