Coherent Unix on a 286

Jack Dikian

ABSTRACT

Good Things Still Come In Small Packages

First came Unix Version 7 from AT&T and then, now we have Coherent from Mark Williams Co. Unix was small, simple and cheap. Unix is still small, simple and very, very cheap. This paper takes a close look at the youngest and .smallest kid on the block, and compares it with its older and bigger brothers, as well as its opponents.

This is a review of Coherent Unix. It was a long time ago, almost ten years ago in fact, when John Lions published what was a complete, annotated listing of AT&T’s Version 7 kernel in the form of two booklets that together are no larger than this issue of AUUGN. Those documents, along with the University of New South Wales’ "1980 Unix Companion" [UNSW], and "The C Programming Language" [R&K], more than anything else provided us with an extraordinary insight into Unix, the Unix philosophy, and its implementation language. For many, including myself, those documents were in a very real sense invaluable. Those documents, however, also represented something else; they were terse. The size of those notes made it possible to have them on hand virtually everywhere we went.

It is significant, therefore, that Coherent Unix is supplied with a single 1100 page manual that is on one hand very reminiscent of those early works, yet on the other borrows much from the more modem and accessible styles such as that found in Kemighan-Pike "The Unix Programming Environment" [K&P]. The Coherent manual contains all the information that the user needs to install, use and, importantly, learn Unix. The manual covers the traditional Unix sections, namely the supported commands, system calls and subroutines, as well as excellent chapters providing tutorial like presentations. These include system administration, UUCP, awk, the C language, ed, lex, the m4 macro processor, make, Micro EMACS, text formatting, the shell and yacc.

I am placing special emphasis on the quality of the supplied manual for one very important reason; this variant of Unix potentially has a very ready market niche in the way of a low-end Unix training platform. Coherent also comes into its own through its use as a cost effective UUCP node or to provide the DOS user with an alternative vista. "Coherent, A Multi-user, Multi-tasking Operating System For The IBM-PC/AT and Compatible 286 or 386 Based Computers" [Coherent]. This brief product sketch printed on the cover jacket of the manual provides the PC enthusiast with enough flavour of Unix to encourage further curiosity. Coherent Unix comes from the 13-year-old compiler vendor Mark Williams Company, based at 60 Revere Drive, Northbrook, Illinois 60062 (uunet!mwc!sales). For US$99.95 you receive a 60-day money back guarantee Unix look-like, and excellent user manual and free technical telephone support.

This system is shipped on four 3.5 inch high density floppy disks and a single copy of the Coherent system manual. A registration card contains a nine digit serial number that the install program prompts for during the installation process. The hardware requirements for this system are very modest when compared with even some DOS applications such as Microsoft Windows. The system requires an IBM AT or clone with 100% compatibility. It does not work on any of the MicroChannel platforms. One high density 3.5" or 5.25" floppy drive, a hard disk with at least 10MB free space, and a minimum of 640K RAM. The manual claims that the system will work with RLL, MFM and most ESDI disk controllers. It should also work with some SCSI host adapters. Coherent includes device drivers for line printers, HP laser printers, COM1 to COM4, RAM disks, tape drives, and the Adaptec SCSI disk controller. ESDI controllers include Ultrascope, Western Digital, and multiport from Amet, Emulex and SEFCO. I suspect, however, that you need to take a close look at exactly what is and isn’t supported. The release notes list more than 100 compatible systems, memory boards and disk controllers. The preparation and installation took me approximately two hours to complete. In theory the actual Coherent install should only take about half an hour, depending on your CPU, but if you, like me, decide to partition the disk between DOS and Unix then you will need to backup your whole disk before you commence the installation. I carried out the installation on a very old 286 clone with 640K and a 40MB disk running DOS 4 with the Gemini EGA 2.4 BIOS. The provided install program drives the user through the installation process from start to finish. It is no more difficult to install Coherent than it is to install any DOS application.

Absolutely no prior knowledge of Unix is required. By far the trickiest section of the installation is when you are asked to re-partition the hard disk. Here you can nominate how much space you wish to allocate to Coherent and DOS, as well as defining the active partition. The operating system mounted on the active partition is booted automatically on start-up. The install program copes very well with the system it is being run on, and tries very hard to prompt you with specific and helpful messages as you go. Once a partition has been allocated to Coherent, the install process bad blocks the nominated partition and makes the file system. You are now ready to reboot the system. The operating system on the active partition boots by default. If you load Coherent on the non-active partition, then you will need to press the number corresponding to the Coherent partition while the system is booting. If Coherent comes up OK, then the remaining three floppies are copied. This step takes a significant part of the overall installation process time.

Uncompressing the man pages and the spell dictionary etc. is slow. Coherent with man pages and dictionary takes up 7MB. This leaves me 13MB of user file space on the Coherent partition, and a further 20MB DOS space. I should mention that the Norton Utilities [Norton] came in very handy at this point because the data remaining on the 20MB DOS partition was almost unusable. It took only minutes for Norton to make sense of the broken directories and help repair them. Coherent Unix comes up multi-user after carrying out a rather slow (3 minutes for 7MB on 286) fsck and prompts for a login with "Coherent login:" At first you get the feeling that you are using a dumb terminal connected to a large AT&T SYS V rel 2 site./bin looks quite comprehensive. But a closer inspection soon tells you why this is the small kid on the block. No POSIX compliancy, X-Windows or NFS. The C compiler is fast, but does not support medium and large models on the 286. Source code is not included, csh is not available, no is off the shelf software. Coherent does, however, fit into 640K of memory (it can address up to 16MB) with the kernel using up a whole 77K. It does give you text formatting facilities through nroff with ms.

The manual also provides a 65 page chapter introducing nroff with very relevant examples. UUCP, as mentioned earlier, is supplied via uuinstall, uucp, uucico, uuxqt, uulog, uuname and uutouch. Once again, the large Remote Communications Utility chapter takes away a lot of the black magic from establishing uucp links. The public domain MicroEMACS is included, as is kermit. The stream editor sed, ed and elvis (vi) are well implemented. I especially found the yacc presentation and program examples quick to implement and easy to learn from. The C compiler, an assembler (for subroutines only), awk and the shell provide a well rounded development suite for training if not for developing real systems. No single platform supporting a dual operating system is complete without a data communication mechanism. Coherent provides a tar like utility called dos which allows the Coherent user to manipulate an MS-DOS file system. It can format or lable an MS-DOS file system, list the files in it, transfer files between it and Coherent or delete files from it. If you wish you can also buy a device driver toolkit for US$39.95. Yes, there are other kids on the block. However Coherent is by far the best dressed for the price. I am going to take a quick look at three other products which Coherent contends with. The first is not really an operating system, but rather a suite of layered utilities called the MKS (Mortice Kern Systems) Toolkit. MKS sits on top of DOS and provides over 100 System V commands including the Korn shell and vi.

However there are no development tools, and because of its dependence on DOS there is no multi-user/multi-tasking facilities. MKS costs $250.00. The second player is Minix (Mini Unix) from Prentice Hall, which is based on AT&T’s Version 7 and is supplied, with source, on 12 3.5" floppy disks. Minix sits on the host hardware and requires at least a 10MB partition if source is to be included. Although there is no UUCP support, Minix does feature networking, rcp and Ethernet. The third, SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) XENIX [SCO] is really a heavy weight in features and price when compared Coherent. SCO has a 198K kernel and requires at least 1 to 2MB of memory and 30MB of disk. It costs $1495.00. In conclusion, Coherent Unix from Mark Williams Co. is a truly high performance for value product. It combines the power and flexibility of Unix with the accessibility of PC based technologies. The manual is excellent and it alone is comparable to many speciality books costing many tens of dollars. The training sector is by far the most suitable environment for this product. Not only can this system be used to provide Unix concepts and training, but other areas such as C, shell, systems administration and text formatting can be mastered. The systems also lends itself as an ideal UUCP node. The Mark Williams Company claims it already has 10,000 satisfied users.., make that 10,001.

References

[UNSW] Unix Companion, 1980, University of NSW.

[R&K] Kemighan, B. & Ritchie, D. The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall, 1978.

[K&P] Kernighan, B. & Pike, R. The Unix Programming Environment. Prentice Hall, 1984.

[Coherent] Coherent Manual, 1990, Mark Williams Co.

[sco] Tech Specialist Journal, January 1991.

[Norton] Norton Utilities, Advanced Edition 4.50, 1987-1988, Peter Norton. Vol 12 No 1 22

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