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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

This page has a lot more photos including manuals:

https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Commodore/CBM900

The part about the OS caught my eye:

>Commodore chose the Mark-Williams "Coherent" clone for the CBM900 which is roughly UNIX System 7, but with a few twists and less features.

>The operating system is delivered on four floopy disks: Low-res and Hi-res boot, and common volume 2 & 3 with more programs. All four floppies contain a filesystem. We have made bit-for-bit images of these floppies, both on the CBM900 harddisk and offline.

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If you’re interested in Coherent, you can get some background on it and even download the source code here: http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/

And here’s a 1998 thread from the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers where Dennis Ritchie (!) recounts his experience of being sent by AT&T to evaluate whether Coherent violated their Unix copyrights: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.folklore.compute...

Wow never thought I'd hear about this OS again. I still have the original manual and discs in the basement. My dad bought it and tinkered with it on a this huge Epson 386 back in the day...I got to the point of X without a window manager and gave up lol.

Some fun facts to get your head wrapped around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company

That's Aaron's dad.

In the early 90's I used to run Coherent on a 386SX. It was my first exposure to a "Unix clones." It had one of the better Unix manuals for the time... very comprehensive. I later moved to Linux probably 1993-ish.

Almost bought it to operate a multiline BBS. The $99 price for a Unix like OS was astonishing. IIRC, my fellow SysOps and I ended up not going that route after contacting the company about the possibility of Coherent running PicoSpan and were told it likely wouldn't fit into the memory space. So we ended up using MajorBBS instead, which worked out fine.

Funny, I just realized something. Remember the Commodore 64? My brother used to call it CBM64, and his initials are BM, so I thought it was C for Commodore + his initials + 64.

And now, looking at CBM900, I got a hint that CBM could have been something else. Quick google search, and I see that it's "Commodore Business Machines", probably inspired by IBM (International Business Machines).

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