Submitted by We missed this earlier this year, but Coherent has been released as open source. Coherent is a UNIX clone originally developed for the PDP-11, but later ported to a number of other platforms, including the IBM PC. It was developed by the Mark Williams Company, and despite an official investigation by AT&T, no signs of copied code were ever found.
Mark Williams Company closed in 1995. In 2001, Bob Swartz asked me to archive the hard disks containing the Mark Williams source repository; the command and system sources here are from that repository. I have long intended to catalog and organize these sources, but in the meantime they are posted here as is. MWC’s documentation guru Fred Butzen provided the MWC documentation sources.
And it is 3-clause BSD license, so most projects can freely reuse the code. Not sure whether the code is worth reuse though.
What a painful website to look at. Oh well. Thanks for the browsers view no style option.
If I remember correctly Bob Swartz is the father of Aaron Swartz.
I never heard about that system. Cool thing. Maybe someone will pick up sources and give this a new life? However there so many UNIX clones, that chances aren`t high for that.
A unix that hasn’t been developed in 20 years? It’s a museum piece.
Downloading the source now. It’ll give me something to do and maybe something worthwhile will come of it.
What are the functional Unix systems as of 2015?
AIX
HP-UX
Solaris
Mac OS X
That’s about it, I think.
By function, I would mean one that companies still rely on for mission critical tasks that I wouldn’t make fun of for doing so.
My old company still has a HP-UX system running their in house inventory. No connectivity to any other system. I would make fun of them for that, but I was part of the sourcing for a replacement. After getting a few multi-million quotes for a replacement, I totally understand why they’re willing to stick with it and pay absurd amounts for replacement parts.
What about BSDs? For example, Netflix relies on FreeBSD.
Well, I was thinking proprietary UNIX’s that comply with the single UNIX specification:
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
BSD’s are unix but they aren’t UNIXⓇ.
They’re Unix-like. They probably would pass the test, but no one wants to spend the money to get certified.
Yeah, unless you have some crazy mission critical legacy application that needs to run on UNIX, FreeBSD isn’t a bad choice most of the time.
I hadn’t heard Netflix was all FreeBSD’d up. any articles to that point? I’d be interested to learn what they see in it today. I’m an old FreeBSD 4.0 guy myself. I had to switch to Linux, due to wide gaps in performance for common applications. Hopefully that’s much less these days.
There have been several presentations on FreeBSD use at netflix. There are also some podcats like this one http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2013/05/bsdtalk226-freebsd-and-netflix….
I think previous bsdcan presentations have covered it also.
The BSD’s performs just as well, if not better, than Linux in server tasks.
They did at one point for server applications I needed, then they did not. Its kind of impossible to say something like that in general.
Actually, it’s perfectly possible to say that in general the are of similar performance, the differences are only in some programs.
I also noted I got downvoted. Sorry, forgot we are not allowed to criticize the almighty Linux.
Edited 2015-04-04 10:47 UTC
I’m really hesitant to say that system A is better or worse at task 1 than system B without running benchmarks of task 1 on system A and system B. I just got burned on this recently from a college that didn’t want to take the time to actually run the bench mark.
Nothing against FreeBSD, I just haven’t seen any relevant benchmarks for things I care about recently.
In this case we do know why. It was due to FreeBSD’s horrible initial attempts at SMP, and are what lead to the DragonFly BSD fork. Right now FreeBSD and Linux both perform very well for server tasks.
Edited 2015-04-07 18:50 UTC
Here we have a copy of an entire system that can be made self-hosted.
They have the essentials of a basic UNIX-ish system, including, notably, a C compiler.
It’s approachable, simply due to its small size. It’s interesting in that it’s a commercial system, rather than academic.
It even has a modicum of history, since these are disk dumps of systems that use version control (RCS). So that’s interesting too.
It would be curious to compare this system, with other UNIX systems of the era, simply to contrast their approaches. In THEORY, this is a “clean room” implementation. It would be interesting now to see how clean that room really was.
It should be of interest to anyone curious about implementation of operating systems, not simply at the kernel level, but the entire eco-system. It’ll be familiar, yet new at the same time.
all I got is the “Coherent” unix clone.
I’ve only had a very quick look at the Coherent src, but it seems like the Minix src is lot cleaner and easier to follow. Plus, Minix supports SMP, threading, networking, virtual memory, etc… and Minix is tiny.
I’m not sure what you expected from an OS that has not seen any development for 20 years.
I hope everyone here knows Swartz was Aaron’s father.
Coherent, right now it is like a gift from the past, unclosed from a Time Capsule. So it does not matter if has the same features that today Unix clones.
If you want a modern Unix install Linux or Freebsd.