I can't believe it's not UNIX
Written on March 14th, 2026 by Tech Ads
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Take it from the critics, Coherent
is so close to UNIX, you won’t
believe your eyes. Or the price.
“Mark Williams Co. seems
to have mastered the art
of illusion; Coherent comes
so fully qualified as a UNIX
clone, you find yourself thinking
‘I can’t believe it’s not UNIX’ ”
—Sean Fulton, UNIX Today!,
November 26, 1990
“,..(Coherent) may be the best thing
that has happened to UNIX yet.”
—William Zachmann, PC Week,
November 5, 1990
“If you want to come as close as you
can to real UNIX for a low price,
COHERENT can’t be beat.”
—Warren Keuffel, Computer Language
Magazine, November 1990
“If you want a UNIX-like develop-
ment and learning system for less
than $100...I don’t see how you can
go wrong with Coherent.”
—David Fiedler, BYTE Magazine,
November 1990
OVER 30 USERS
AND MORE EVERY DAY!
Why is Coherent now the
world’s best-selling UNIX clone?
MWC
No. of Manuals
No. of Disks
Kemel Size 198K
Install Time 20-30 min. 3-4hours
Suggested Disk Space 10 meg 30 meg
Min. Memory Required 640K 1-2 meg
Performance* 38.7 sec 1003sec
Price $99.95 $1495.00
"Byte Exec! benchmark, 1000 iterations on 20 MHZ 386.
Hardware requirements: 1.2 meg 544" or 14 meg 342" floppy,
and hard disk.
it’s not UNIX?”
$99.95"
Because like the original UNIX,
Coherent is a powerful, multi-user,
multi-tasking development system
with a complete UNIX-compatible
kernel and C compiler.
Features include Lex and Yacc,
a vi editor, SCSI support and UUCP
capabilities.
And Coherent comes with a full
set of over 200 UNIX commands
including text processing, program
development, administrative and
maintenance functions. All of it fully
documented in our highly acclaimed
1200 page manual.
WHAT UNIX WAS MEANT TO BE.
Unlike current versions of
UNIX, Coherent is lean and efficient.
Small and beautifully powerful, the
way UNIX was originally designed.
Coherent runs on affordable
286 as well as 386 and 486 based
IBM-PCs and compatibles with
space to spare. Enough space to keep
DOS co-residing on your hard disk.
And it’s so fast to install, so fast
to learn and just so fast, Coherent
leaves UNIX in the dust.
—Sean Fulton, UNIX Today!
IT KEEPS GETTING BETTER.
Like Coherent, all Mark
Williams products are incredible
values. Including regular updates
with new and enhanced features. Our
write-your-own device driver kit.
And COHware, contributed software
on diskette.
There’s also on-going free tech-
nical support via telephone. An
active user network and a UUCP
Bulletin Board System. Plus, with
our new 3.2 release:
« Anew Korn shell with sophisti-
cated command-line editing.
* Postscript and PCL support for
troff adding access to hundreds of
new fonts.
* Improved UUCP support.
¢ International keyboard and
character set support.
TAKE 60 DAYS TO
CONVINCE YOURSELE
Will you agree with the critics
and Coherent’s 25,000-plus users?
Try it. And if you don’t think
Coherent is everything you ever
wanted in UNIX, we'll refund your
money. No problem. No hassle.
You can’t go wrong. So get to
a phone, FAX or mailbox now and
order Coherent today. At $99.95,
it’s unbelievable.
1-800-MARK WMS
(1-800-627-5967 or 1-708-291-6700)
FAX: 1-708-291-6750
60-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE!
An Mark Williams
60 Revere Drive
Northbrook, IL. 60062
Sy pa eg Coherent is a trademark of Mark
UNIX ts a trademark of AT&T. XENEX ts a
trademark of Microsoft.
Distributors: Australia (07) 266-2270, Czechoslovakia 632-2877, Denmark 42-88-72-49, Finland 47-871-201, France (1) 46-72-80-74,
Germany (0511) 53-72-95/(030) 313-7015, Norway 271-0950, Singapore 336-0188, Sweden (0) 660-192-90.
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‘I can’t believe it’s not UNIX’
Coherent 3.2 was a proprietary Unix clone sold by the Mark Williams Company. A 1998 Dennis Ritchie usenet post covers a visit to the Mark Williams Company and discusses what, if any, code linked Coherent and AT&T unix.
A reasonably positive review of Coherent 3.2 can be found in MicroTimes No. 86
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