AET Ltd, based in Lichfield, Staffordshire, has picked up what is one of the most venerable unlicensed rewrites of Unix: it is to market Chicago, Illinois-based Mark Williams Co’s Coherent stripped-down Unix in the UK. Coherent costs under ?100, and with less than 100,000 lines of code – compared with the 1.2m in Unix System V – it requires less than 10Mb disk and runs on Intel Corp 80286-, 80386- and 80486-based systems. Four disks and one manual will get you going with Coherent which comes with a C compiler, 200 Unix commands and the Bourne shell in the price. It resides in its own partition on an MS-DOS-based personal computer – and text files can be transferred between the two environments.
