Mark Williams Company

~ the obit ~

The company was named after a middle name. Robert Swartz took over a business that had been making a soft drink called Dr. Enuf, moved it into software with his father's help, and called it after his father, William Mark Swartz. That was 1977, in Chicago, and the first product was XYBASIC, a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 small enough to burn onto an EPROM and run on a bare processor with no operating system underneath it.

Then they wrote a Unix. Not a licensed Unix and not a port of one: Coherent was built from the published manuals by a group largely out of the University of Waterloo, Tom Duff and Dave Conroy among them, and it behaved like Seventh Edition Unix without containing any of AT&T's code. It ran on the PDP-11 in 1980 and reached the consumer market in 1983 at five hundred dollars a copy. Version 3 wanted a 286. Version 4, in 1992, wanted a 386 and brought X11 with it, and by then the price had come down to ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.

For most of its life Coherent was the cheap answer to a question that otherwise cost thousands. If you had a PC and wanted a real multiuser system with a C compiler and man pages on it, the alternatives were Xenix or a workstation you could not afford. Coherent came on a small stack of floppies with a printed manual that ran past twelve hundred pages, most of it a lexicon of over a thousand articles, typeset by a shell script feeding troff and printed on a laser printer because PDF did not exist yet.

Robert Swartz posted the end to Usenet on 1 february 1995. Linux had been growing for three years by then and it was free, BSD had reached x86 hardware at the same price, and a commercially packaged Unix clone had nothing left to sell. This company closed when i was eleven, with no modem in the house and no idea that buying a unix in a box had ever been one of the options.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

AT&T did not believe Coherent could exist. Somebody there decided a small Chicago outfit could not have reproduced Unix behavior from documentation alone, and a delegation went to inspect the source code for infringement. Dennis Ritchie was on it.

His conclusion is the best review the product ever got. He wrote that it was very hard to believe Coherent and its basic applications had been created without considerable study of the Unix source, and then said plainly that he found nothing that was copied, and that he could never testify that what they had produced was irreproducible from the manual. So the man who wrote Unix looked at their Unix, said it was too good to be independent work, and confirmed it was independent work anyway.

~ what really happened ~

Coherent was always in second place behind Xenix, which had Microsoft and then Santa Cruz Operation behind it. Second place in a small market is survivable as long as the market keeps paying. In the early nineties Linux arrived with distributions like Slackware behind it, and BSD reached commodity Intel hardware at the same price of nothing. Windows NT was meanwhile taking the low end of the workstation business out from under commercial Unix entirely.

None of that could be answered by a company whose whole proposition was a lower price. There is no lower price than free, and a boxed product with a printed manual has costs that a tarball on an FTP server does not. The last release was 4.2.14 in 1994. The announcement came a few months later.

~ what got buried with it ~

In january 2015, twenty years after the company closed, Swartz agreed to let the Coherent sources go out under a BSD license, and a former employee posted the manual as PDFs. It is all readable now, for free, which is the condition that killed it.

The other thing worth recording is whose house this was. Robert Swartz is the father of Aaron Swartz, who grew up around a company whose business was a Unix you could buy for a hundred dollars, and who spent his own short career arguing that the important things should not cost anything at all. Nobody planned that as a line of descent. It is there in the paperwork regardless.

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