[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Dan Cross]

Bob Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, has allowed the sources for
COHERENT to be published under a three-clause BSD license.  Steve Ness is
hosting them.  They are available here:

    http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php

For reference, for folks who don't know what COHERENT is, it started as a
clone of 7th Edition, but grew more modern features over time.  Dennis
Ritchie's recollections of his interaction with it:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4/5B41Uym6d4QJ

And of course the requisite Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

        - Dan C.

PS: I hold a soft spot for COHERENT in my heart.  I became interested in
Unix in high school, but this was before Linux was really a thing and
access to other systems was still hard to come by.  I spotted an ad for
COHERENT in the back of one of the PC-oriented publications at the time,
"Computer Shopper" or some such, and realized that it was *almost* within
my reach financially and that I could install it on the computer I already
owned.  Over the next month or so, I scraped up enough money to buy a copy,
did so, and put it on my PC.  It was quirky compared to actual Unix
distributions, but it was enough to give one a flavor for things.  The
manual, in particular, did not follow the traditional Unix format, but
rather was an alphabetical "lexicon" of commands, system calls and
functions and was (I've always thought) particularly well done.  Links to
the COHERENT lexicon and various other documents:
http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/.

I graduated onto other systems rather quickly, but COHERENT served as my
introduction to Unix and Unix-like systems.

PPS: Bob Swartz is the father of the late Aaron Swartz.
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Larry McVoy]

This one line hit me hard:

> PPS: Bob Swartz is the father of the late Aaron Swartz.

Small world.  The fact that he is still doing good things after losing his
son, wow.

I'm a guy who would probably have gone postal if I lost my son.  My heart
and admiration goes out to Bob.

On a fun note, I remember Coherent, it was fun.

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Larry McVoy]

And as a troff fan, I love their docs.  My team hates that I love troff
but I do.  It's a pretty decent markup language and it lends itself to
being version controlled.  As the BitKeeper guy I like version control.

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 06:40:59PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> This one line hit me hard:
> 
> > PPS: Bob Swartz is the father of the late Aaron Swartz.
> 
> Small world.  The fact that he is still doing good things after losing his
> son, wow.
> 
> I'm a guy who would probably have gone postal if I lost my son.  My heart
> and admiration goes out to Bob.
> 
> On a fun note, I remember Coherent, it was fun.
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Warner Losh]

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I wonder if this will run on my old DEC Rainbow 100B…  There was a binary version
of COHERENT for the RAINBOW, iirc, that I’ve been hoping to get my hands on
for more years than most of my co-workers have been alive… But I’m pretty sure that
was version 2….  Hmmm, some googling suggests it was Venix/86R, which sadly
hasn’t turned up in years :(

Warner

> On Jan 5, 2015, at 7:49 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> And as a troff fan, I love their docs.  My team hates that I love troff
> but I do.  It's a pretty decent markup language and it lends itself to
> being version controlled.  As the BitKeeper guy I like version control.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 06:40:59PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> This one line hit me hard:
>> 
>>> PPS: Bob Swartz is the father of the late Aaron Swartz.
>> 
>> Small world.  The fact that he is still doing good things after losing his
>> son, wow.
>> 
>> I'm a guy who would probably have gone postal if I lost my son.  My heart
>> and admiration goes out to Bob.
>> 
>> On a fun note, I remember Coherent, it was fun.
>> _______________________________________________
>> TUHS mailing list
>> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> 
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Warren Toomey]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 09:23:58PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>    Bob Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, has allowed the sources for
>    COHERENT to be published under a three-clause BSD license.  Steve Ness
>    is hosting them.  They are available here:
>       http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php

The Unix Archive has some Coherent files at:
	http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Other/Coherent/

I'll mirror Steve's files along with the copyright notice and place them
in a sub-folder of the above URL.

Cheers all,
	Warren

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Warner Losh]

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> On Jan 6, 2015, at 1:07 AM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 09:23:58PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>>   Bob Swartz, founder of Mark Williams Co, has allowed the sources for
>>   COHERENT to be published under a three-clause BSD license.  Steve Ness
>>   is hosting them.  They are available here:
>>      http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php
> 
> The Unix Archive has some Coherent files at:
> 	http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Other/Coherent/
> 
> I'll mirror Steve's files along with the copyright notice and place them
> in a sub-folder of the above URL.

Cool! Looking at Steve’s files, though, it looks like they could use some curating
since they are rather jumbled up. It’s great all the stuff that’s there is there, but
it makes it a bit hard to browse with tarballs inside of tarballs and multiple copies
of what looks like the same thing (but with differences).

Also, the mirrors mentioned in the Other/Coherent read me appear to be gone.

Warner

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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Jose R. Valverde]

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What Andrzej fails to mention is that for quite a long time, Coherent has been
maintained alive by a reduced groups of enthusiasts gathered around him and
comp.os.coherent and that a binary distribution was also available thanks to
a great extent to his devoted work (he was one of the few who had permission 
to).

I have mentioned on occasion that I remember the code being left loose under
a permissive license sometime around the end of the '90s, and I got a copy 
then, but -sadly- didn't keep the original message with the license (I was 
switching jobs or house or both or traveling or something).

Anyway, the available binary distro can be run on Qemu reasonably well. I think
I was the first to succeed running it on 2008 on Qemu 0.9.1.

In any case, I would like to publicly thank Adrzej for all the work he has been
doing all these years to keep Coherent alive.

				j



On Wed, 7 Jan 2015 21:17:50 +0100
Andrzej Popielewicz <root at amu.edu.pl> wrote:
> * Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> [2015-01-06 20:50:23]:
> 
> > On 2015-01-06 20:38, Milo Velimirović wrote:
> > >On Jan 6, 2015, at 12:41 PM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> > >
> > >>On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:48, Rico Pajarola wrote:
> > >>>adding the list back
> > >>>
> > >>>On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> > >>>wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>>This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working
> > >>>>version of
> > >>>>Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> > >>>>interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at
> > >>>>low-end
> > >>>>hardware.
> > >>
> > >>In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in size
> > >>- maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?
> > >
> > >I had exactly that thought after I downloaded the tar ball this
> > >morning. Any suggestions for a VM config that would facilitate this
> > >would be welcome. Otherwise I???m going to stumble through virtual box
> > >and see what happens.
> > 
> > A quick try with bochs bails out on me, but at least reveals the version:
> > 
> >     COHERENT Tertiary boot Version 1.2.7
> >     If installing COHERENT, please type "begin".
> >     ? begin
> >     Loading COHERENT.
> >     -
> >     Loading COHERENT data.
> > [-screen clears-]
> >     *** COHERENT Version 4.2.10 - 386 Mode.  5712KB free memory. ***
> >     Color.  NDP=387.  2528 buffers.  2521 buckets.  64 clists.
> >     256KB kalloc pool.  0 KB phys pool.
> >     Cyrix OEM CPU Detected
> >     Copyright 1982, 1994 Mark Williams Company
> >     fd0: <Door Open>
> >     PANIC : fsminit: no rootdev(4,15)
> >     Call backtrace:  -> ffc28142 -> ffc19129 -> ffc002b6
> > 
> > If you want to run COHERENT in a VM this is mandatory reading.
> > 
> > http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-life-with-coherent-part-1.html
> > http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.nl/2012/05/my-life-with-coherent-part-2.html
> > 
> > /Jacob
> > _______________________________________________
> > TUHS mailing list
> > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> 
> You have to inform the emulator that You are booting from floppy.
> The message no rootdev(4,15) means no floppy there (4 major 15 minor number).
> Installator awaits media on the floppy.
> But I had tested only virtual box.
> Andrzej
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs


-- 
		Scientific Computing Service
	Solving all your computer needs for Scientific
			Research.

		http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 2:40 PM, Andrzej Popielewicz <
andrzejpopielewicz at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com
> wrote:
> > > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working
version
> > > of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should
be
> > > interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at
low-end
> > > hardware.
> >
> > Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and
> > catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it
(and
> > not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is
a
> > snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was
> > asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were
> > sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of
> > COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their
internal
> > development practices and release processes to do so successfully;
> > knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some
> > motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect
it's
> > more useful as a case study than as working code.
>
> Hi Dan,
> What to You mean by building distribution. The archive contains original
distribution
> of Coherent 4.2.10. Or You mean one could build quite new distribution ?
> I mean, which would work on modern hardware ?

To a first order approximation, I meant regenerating the installation media
from source.

You would certainly know more than I would about it; if you say it can be
done, I believe you.  :-)  I don't know how to go about it, though (I
assume it involves typing more than one command, but I could well be wrong).

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Jacob Goense]

On 2015-01-07 21:17, Andrzej Popielewicz wrote:
> * Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> [2015-01-06 20:50:23]:
>> A quick try with bochs bails out on me, but at least reveals the 
>> version:
>> 
>>     COHERENT Tertiary boot Version 1.2.7
>>     If installing COHERENT, please type "begin".
>>     ? begin
>>     Loading COHERENT.
>>     -
>>     Loading COHERENT data.
>> [-screen clears-]
>>     *** COHERENT Version 4.2.10 - 386 Mode.  5712KB free memory. ***
>>     Color.  NDP=387.  2528 buffers.  2521 buckets.  64 clists.
>>     256KB kalloc pool.  0 KB phys pool.
>>     Cyrix OEM CPU Detected
>>     Copyright 1982, 1994 Mark Williams Company
>>     fd0: <Door Open>
>>     PANIC : fsminit: no rootdev(4,15)
>>     Call backtrace:  -> ffc28142 -> ffc19129 -> ffc002b6
> 
> You have to inform the emulator that You are booting from floppy.
> The message no rootdev(4,15) means no floppy there (4 major 15 minor 
> number).
> Installator awaits media on the floppy.
> But I had tested only virtual box.

That's exactly what I thought I did in the bochs config.

     floppya: 1_44=d1, status=inserted
     boot: floppy

The bochs floppy drive and the Coherent #1 disk never wanted to dance.
The last time I tried before was with bochs-2.4.2 and with bochs-2.6.7
I still get the dreaded <Door Open> message.

If you know the magic incantation to get it past that in bochs, please
let me know.

Meanwhile it installs and seems to run like a charm in qemu-2.2.0.

/Jacob

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Warner Losh]

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There’s a PS2 kernel directory in one of the files. This is a 3.x based kernel and runs on 286. There are some vestiges of 8086, but I don’t know how well it will work. It looked fairly incomplete to me…

Warner

> On Jan 7, 2015, at 12:02 PM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> 
> My main interest is actually in pre-386 code. I'd love to see how a Unix-like system could be made to work on an 8086 or a 286. Did any of that code survive to the 4.2 era or were things 32-bit only by that point?
> 
> Mike
> 
> On Jan 7, 2015 1:46 PM, "Andrzej Popielewicz" <andrzejpopielewicz at gmail.com> wrote:
> * Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> [2015-01-06 11:09:58]:
> 
> >
> > > On Jan 6, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> > > adding the list back
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> > > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end hardware.
> > >
> > > Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal development practices and release processes to do so successfully; knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's more useful as a case study than as working code.
> >
> > Looking at the tarballs and the tarballs inside, this is a mess. It looks like it is all there, but there???s multiple copies of things that are almost identical, RCS files that are mostly enough, but not completely enough, etc. Plus they were using gcc 2.5.1 for compiling things, so using a more modern compiler likely will result in ???difficulties???. There???s some docs laying around, but I haven???t read through them all. The collection needs curating TLC...
> >
> > Warner
> >
> 
> 
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> > TUHS mailing list
> > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> Hi,
> They have used also gcc-2.5.6 , which is in TUHS archives , I believe.
> I have ported gcc-2.8.1,2.95.3,3.2.3 and 4.2.x. Almost 95% of kernel sources
> compiles well with these newer compilers.
> Andrzej
> 
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

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* Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> [2015-01-06 20:50:23]:

> On 2015-01-06 20:38, Milo Velimirović wrote:
> >On Jan 6, 2015, at 12:41 PM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> >
> >>On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:48, Rico Pajarola wrote:
> >>>adding the list back
> >>>
> >>>On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> >>>wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working
> >>>>version of
> >>>>Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> >>>>interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at
> >>>>low-end
> >>>>hardware.
> >>
> >>In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in size
> >>- maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?
> >
> >I had exactly that thought after I downloaded the tar ball this
> >morning. Any suggestions for a VM config that would facilitate this
> >would be welcome. Otherwise I???m going to stumble through virtual box
> >and see what happens.
> 
> A quick try with bochs bails out on me, but at least reveals the version:
> 
>     COHERENT Tertiary boot Version 1.2.7
>     If installing COHERENT, please type "begin".
>     ? begin
>     Loading COHERENT.
>     -
>     Loading COHERENT data.
> [-screen clears-]
>     *** COHERENT Version 4.2.10 - 386 Mode.  5712KB free memory. ***
>     Color.  NDP=387.  2528 buffers.  2521 buckets.  64 clists.
>     256KB kalloc pool.  0 KB phys pool.
>     Cyrix OEM CPU Detected
>     Copyright 1982, 1994 Mark Williams Company
>     fd0: <Door Open>
>     PANIC : fsminit: no rootdev(4,15)
>     Call backtrace:  -> ffc28142 -> ffc19129 -> ffc002b6
> 
> If you want to run COHERENT in a VM this is mandatory reading.
> 
> http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-life-with-coherent-part-1.html
> http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.nl/2012/05/my-life-with-coherent-part-2.html
> 
> /Jacob
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

You have to inform the emulator that You are booting from floppy.
The message no rootdev(4,15) means no floppy there (4 major 15 minor number).
Installator awaits media on the floppy.
But I had tested only virtual box.
Andrzej

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

* Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> [2015-01-06 11:48:55]:

> adding the list back
> 
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> 
> > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of
> > Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> > interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
> > hardware.
> >
> > Mike
> >

> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Hi
Yes. You can build 4.2.10 or 4.2.14 kernel from sources.
Usually You will install using full distribution media for 4.2.10 and then
rebuild using the full sources, distribution media are of course 
in the archive.

Andrzej

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

* Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> [2015-01-06 11:09:58]:

> 
> > On Jan 6, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> > adding the list back
> > 
> > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end hardware.
> > 
> > Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal development practices and release processes to do so successfully; knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's more useful as a case study than as working code.
> 
> Looking at the tarballs and the tarballs inside, this is a mess. It looks like it is all there, but there???s multiple copies of things that are almost identical, RCS files that are mostly enough, but not completely enough, etc. Plus they were using gcc 2.5.1 for compiling things, so using a more modern compiler likely will result in ???difficulties???. There???s some docs laying around, but I haven???t read through them all. The collection needs curating TLC...
> 
> Warner
> 



> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Hi,
They have used also gcc-2.5.6 , which is in TUHS archives , I believe.
I have ported gcc-2.8.1,2.95.3,3.2.3 and 4.2.x. Almost 95% of kernel sources
compiles well with these newer compilers.
Andrzej

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

* Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> [2015-01-06 12:04:52]:

> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> 
> > adding the list back
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version
> >> of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> >> interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
> >> hardware.
> >>
> > Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and
> catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and
> not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a
> snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was
> asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were
> sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of
> COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal
> development practices and release processes to do so successfully;
> knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some
> motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's
> more useful as a case study than as working code.
> 
>         - Dan C.

> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Hi Dan,
What to You mean by building distribution. The archive contains original distribution 
of Coherent 4.2.10. Or You mean one could build quite new distribution ?
I mean, which would work on modern hardware ?
Andrzej 

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Andrzej Popielewicz]

* Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> [2015-01-06 11:48:55]:

> adding the list back
> 
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> 
> > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of
> > Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> > interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
> > hardware.
> >
> > Mike
> >

> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

Hi
This archive contains full sources for 4.2.10 and 4.2.12 .
And You can build working version of the system.
It contains also full installation media (4 floppy images).
So usually You will install the system and You can rebuild the system
using the sources.
It contains also sources of Coherent 3.x.
Andrzej

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Michael Kerpan]

My main interest is actually in pre-386 code. I'd love to see how a
Unix-like system could be made to work on an 8086 or a 286. Did any of that
code survive to the 4.2 era or were things 32-bit only by that point?

Mike
On Jan 7, 2015 1:46 PM, "Andrzej Popielewicz" <andrzejpopielewicz at gmail.com>
wrote:

> * Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> [2015-01-06 11:09:58]:
>
> >
> > > On Jan 6, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> > > adding the list back
> > >
> > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> wrote:
> > > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working
> version of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it
> should be interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at
> low-end hardware.
> > >
> > > Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and
> catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and
> not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a
> snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was
> asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were
> sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of
> COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal
> development practices and release processes to do so successfully;
> knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some
> motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's
> more useful as a case study than as working code.
> >
> > Looking at the tarballs and the tarballs inside, this is a mess. It
> looks like it is all there, but there???s multiple copies of things that
> are almost identical, RCS files that are mostly enough, but not completely
> enough, etc. Plus they were using gcc 2.5.1 for compiling things, so using
> a more modern compiler likely will result in ???difficulties???. There???s
> some docs laying around, but I haven???t read through them all. The
> collection needs curating TLC...
> >
> > Warner
> >
>
>
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > TUHS mailing list
> > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
> Hi,
> They have used also gcc-2.5.6 , which is in TUHS archives , I believe.
> I have ported gcc-2.8.1,2.95.3,3.2.3 and 4.2.x. Almost 95% of kernel
> sources
> compiles well with these newer compilers.
> Andrzej
>
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Dan Cross]

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On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Milo Velimirović <milov at cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:

> On Jan 6, 2015, at 12:41 PM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> > In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in size
> > - maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?
>
> I had exactly that thought after I downloaded the tar ball this morning.
> Any suggestions for a VM config that would facilitate this would be
> welcome. Otherwise I’m going to stumble through virtual box and see what
> happens.
>

Those look an awful lot like the distribution disks for COHERENT 4.2.10.
There's a writeup of how to get that installed and running under qemu here:
http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.in/2012/05/my-life-with-coherent-part-2.html

However, there have been some reports of stability issues with the emulated
disk under qemu; VirtualBox seems to be the most consistently reliable (and
fast!) alternative, but you have to run it under a 32-bit host OS.  I ended
up installing a 32-bit Linux under VMWare to run virtual box to run
COHERENT (yes, it's awful).  I haven't tried qemu lately to see if the
stability problems have been addressed, though.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Jacob Goense]

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On 2015-01-06 20:38, Milo Velimirović wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2015, at 12:41 PM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:48, Rico Pajarola wrote:
>>> adding the list back
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working 
>>>> version of
>>>> Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
>>>> interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at 
>>>> low-end
>>>> hardware.
>> 
>> In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in 
>> size
>> - maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?
> 
> I had exactly that thought after I downloaded the tar ball this
> morning. Any suggestions for a VM config that would facilitate this
> would be welcome. Otherwise I’m going to stumble through virtual box
> and see what happens.

A quick try with bochs bails out on me, but at least reveals the 
version:

     COHERENT Tertiary boot Version 1.2.7
     If installing COHERENT, please type "begin".
     ? begin
     Loading COHERENT.
     -
     Loading COHERENT data.
[-screen clears-]
     *** COHERENT Version 4.2.10 - 386 Mode.  5712KB free memory. ***
     Color.  NDP=387.  2528 buffers.  2521 buckets.  64 clists.
     256KB kalloc pool.  0 KB phys pool.
     Cyrix OEM CPU Detected
     Copyright 1982, 1994 Mark Williams Company
     fd0: <Door Open>
     PANIC : fsminit: no rootdev(4,15)
     Call backtrace:  -> ffc28142 -> ffc19129 -> ffc002b6

If you want to run COHERENT in a VM this is mandatory reading.

http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.com/2012/02/my-life-with-coherent-part-1.html
http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.nl/2012/05/my-life-with-coherent-part-2.html

/Jacob

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Milo Velimirović]

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On Jan 6, 2015, at 12:41 PM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:48, Rico Pajarola wrote:
>> adding the list back
>> 
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of
>>> Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
>>> interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
>>> hardware.
> 
> In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in size
> - maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?

I had exactly that thought after I downloaded the tar ball this morning. Any suggestions for a VM config that would facilitate this would be welcome. Otherwise I’m going to stumble through virtual box and see what happens.

 - Milo

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[random832]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:48, Rico Pajarola wrote:
> adding the list back
> 
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of
> > Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> > interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
> > hardware.

In the "distrib" directory there are four files exactly 1440 kb in size
- maybe someone could try loading those into a VM/Emulator?

[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Warner Losh]

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> On Jan 6, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:
> adding the list back
> 
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:
> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end hardware.
> 
> Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal development practices and release processes to do so successfully; knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's more useful as a case study than as working code.

Looking at the tarballs and the tarballs inside, this is a mess. It looks like it is all there, but there’s multiple copies of things that are almost identical, RCS files that are mostly enough, but not completely enough, etc. Plus they were using gcc 2.5.1 for compiling things, so using a more modern compiler likely will result in “difficulties”. There’s some docs laying around, but I haven’t read through them all. The collection needs curating TLC...

Warner

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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:

> adding the list back
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>
> wrote:
>
>> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version
>> of Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
>> interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
>> hardware.
>>
> Unknown (to me, anyway).  Steve said he had intended to organize and
catalog the code at some point, but that he hasn't gotten around to it (and
not to hold one's breath).  I gathered that the tar ball he provided is a
snapshot of (a subset of?) the MWC development disks at the time he was
asked to create the archive.  To that end, I suspect that if one were
sufficiently motivated one *could* use it to build a distribution of
COHERENT, but I suspect you'd have to know quite a bit about their internal
development practices and release processes to do so successfully;
knowledge that may very well have been lost over time.  Perhaps some
motivated person will be able to reverse engineer it, though I suspect it's
more useful as a case study than as working code.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Rico Pajarola]

adding the list back

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com> wrote:

> This is a cool development. Does this code build into a working version of
> Coherent or is this mainly useful to study? Either way, it should be
> interesting to look at the code for a clone specifically aimed at low-end
> hardware.
>
> Mike
>
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Rico Pajarola]

do you still have those black-box tests somewhere?

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 8:41 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> A very nice addition to the archives. Thank you.
>
> I well remember our disbelief that Mark Williams wrote all its own
> code, unlike other vendors who had professed the same. As Dennis
> described, we had fun putting together  black-box tests that
> recognized  undocumented quirks (or bugs) in our code. We were
> duly impressed when the results came back negative.
>
> Doug
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
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[TUHS] COHERENT sources released under 3-clause BSD license.

[Doug McIlroy]

A very nice addition to the archives. Thank you.

I well remember our disbelief that Mark Williams wrote all its own
code, unlike other vendors who had professed the same. As Dennis
described, we had fun putting together  black-box tests that
recognized  undocumented quirks (or bugs) in our code. We were
duly impressed when the results came back negative.

Doug