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Tony from S. FL

Sharkonwheels

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 21, 2006
Messages
1,640
Location
South Florida
Been posting, no intro, so here it is....

I guess some of the posts have given away my age - 38 at present, and rapidly accelerating :D

First exposure was in Junior High / High School, TRS-80s.
First home PC was a Timex Sinclair 1000

I grew up in the era where everywhere you wentm you saw the TV_connected home computers for sale: the TI 99/4a's, the Commodores, the Sinclairs, etc... Yes, I was one of those that typed:

10 PRINT "HELLO ";
20 GOTO 10

on every one I saw

after the Sinclair, my grandfather bought me a TRS-80 COCO2 64K, and I was HOOKED. I still have that one, though it is non-functional for many years now, and have a massive CoCo3 setup, including an FD502 controller, Burke & Burke XT hard disk interface, with a 32Mb RLL drive, Cloud-9 TC3 SCSI+CLock.

Over the years, I've owned everything from Altairs and IMSAI's (man - why'd I ever sell those?!?!?!?) to kaypro 2/IV/10's, Tandy 4P's, multiple iterations of PC's.

By trade, I'm an IT guy, of course. I'm in charge of Casino systems for a major cruise line.

My current stash is some older Macs, a pristine Osborne 1 with many options, software, amd manuals, about a half-dozen or so pocket computersand some TI and HP calculators,
4 SGI Indy's, and SGI Indigo2 Extreme, and an SGI Iris Indigo.
Yes, I love SGI's.
No, I tried RS/6000's, don't like AIX.
No, I tried a few HP-UX machines, don't like HP-UX. Gave away my media, matter of fact (10.20, and 11i)
Yes, I was one of the nuts that bought Coherent in the early 90's.
Yes, I'm old enough to have installed 386BSD when it was released by the Jolitz'!
Yes, I do still own the 4.4 BSD manual set.
Yes, I do remember playing with Linux when it was only a boot and root floppy.

I've always been a CP/M buff, and have ALWAYS had SOMETHING in the house that was CP/M.

I don't think that will ever change, hardware-survival willing.


Tony
 
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Like the others said, "Welcome to the VCF!". :)

Perhaps we can have a discussion on SGI and IRIX some time.

I like CP/M too, and am just getting back in to it. I wish I had continued to use it over the years, because I sure have forgotten a lot about it! ;-)
 
Welcome!

I too, bought Coherent in the 1990s. That was some serious money for a teenager just so I could have Unix on my PC. I bought two versions. The original with that massive manual and later the supplement with X.

I'm an SGI fan as well. An Iris Indigo is one of my current projects.

Matt
 
Ahhhh.....IRIX. I love it. I love SGI's. At one point, my house had:

The 4-5 current Indy's: 1 is really nice. R5000/180SC,256MB,9GB , Phobos 100MBit NIC. I also have the Indy video with Cosmo Compress somewhere....
3 Iris Indigo's
3 Indigo 2's
3 O2's, only one was decent though - has an R5200 - other 2 were R5000.
2 Octanes (2xR10K/195, MXI+SI, 2GB, 18GB and 1xR12K360,2GB,9GB,MXI)
2 Origin200's with the CrayLink interconnect
2 Onyx's (had to unload them - too big, too power hungry, too hot!)

Man - you couldn't even WALK into my home office. First of all, there was a 15degree spike when ya walk in, and then you have to hop-scotch aroung all the equipment!!!

Got rid of almost all. Only have the Indy's, an Indigo2 Extreme, and my beloved Iris Indigo R4000. Need a kb and mouse,

mpickering: Coherent was like $99 back then, right? That's what I remember paying!

Heh - I got a copy of it, and all the add-ons, if ya wanna stroll down memory lane. Floppy disk images!


Tony
 
I do! I used to run it on my ol' Tandy '286 laptop, in the mid-ninties or so. My copy came from a thrift shop for a couple of bucks, but I've long since lost it.

--T
 
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Coherent was a UNIX clone. It was developed in the early 1990s by the Mark Williams Corporation. It sold on floppy for the aforementioned $99 for the basic OS. It came with the floppies (lots of them) and this huge, thick paperback manual.

It attracted attention at the time because of its cost and because it was free of any AT&T code. AT&T even sent folks to MWC to investigate the OS to make sure they hadn't appropriated any System V source code in its development. Thus, it was one of the first true clones of UNIX. Linux at that time was still three years in the future for v0.01 and the fight between USL and UCB over BSD was about to begin.

MWC released a much anticipated enhancement to Coherent with included a functioning X implementation. This was my first introduction to X and twm. It was also the first time I would acquire hardware specifically to run X (a Trident VGA card and a multi-sync monitor).

Thus, at 17, I had a UNIX workstation running at home. I later switched back to Windows since I couldn't do a lot at the time but also acquired a second machine and ran Coherent on it. For a time, I had serial terminals hooked up to my Coherent box and ran my first network of sorts. I never found out what my parents thought of all this. :)

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

Matt
 
Very accurate account. I can;t even add anything save one:

The ONLY reason Coherent got swamped over by the likes of 386BSD, and later Linux, was there was NEVER any networking added.

I am remembering correctly, right? No TCPIP susbsystem?

I have a copy (floppy images) of ATT SVR4 for at/386+, but it has no LAN support either, so I've only briefly played with it.


Tony
 
OK. As promised.

Coherent is available via FTP at:

ftp.mayn.de/pub/really_old_stuff/coherent

Figured it's faster than getting it from ME!
It says use dd to recreate the floppies, but the /dos folder has rawrite.exe for you to do it with under dos/Win

If you want to play, VMWare has a freebie version, and microsoft has the freebie Virtual Server, but again, Usenet is your friend: binaries.nl and newzbin.com searches fo Virtual PC and VMWare


Happy Coherenting!



Tony
 
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