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by nils-m-holm
2446 days ago
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Thank you for sharing the story! Even these days I enjoy hearing about the company that produced the first Unix system that I used at home (Coherent 3.0). It was my main operating system for more than 10 years and, looking back, I have never enjoyed computing more than in those days. Regarding the driver bug, I guess I was lucky, because I still used a MR-535 MFM disk in the late 1990's. I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Personally I was not even happy about the move from V7 to POSIX, because I enjoyed the simplicity of V7 very much, but things started to change and supporting POSIX was certainly a neccessity at that time. Anyway, thanks for contributing to a great OS! I still keep a VM with 3.2 around and use it regularly. |
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Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, and the later IDE "cable select" schemes did really help to mitigate a lot of the damage from improperly terminated cables.
> Anyway, thanks for contributing to a great OS!
Well, other than living in infamy due to introducing that bug, I didn't start there until the push to turn 4.0 from a tech demo into a real product. So really all the credit for 3.2 and earlier which set the foundation for Coherent belongs to the other guys, many of whom were long gone by the time I got there like Dave Conroy (who wrote the MicroEMACS I loved to use) and Randall Howard (who went on to found MKS). There were some great people from the earlier days still there though, like Norm Bartek, Hal Snyder and La Monte Yarroll who where there when I joined and of course Steve Ness who was the sole man behind the MWC C Compiler (much as Fred was responsible for that remarkable manual).
Also worth a mention, among all the other notable characters I remember fondly is one of the support/QA folks at MWC: Jim Leonard aka Trixter, who became a notable demoscene figure - https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...