If anyone is interested I still have my 5-1/4 inch floppy disks with Coherent and the book. I don't know why I saved it all these years... The book is a great reference... Mark Williams company is defunct but Coherent was the bomb of an OS, on a PC with a 286/386 processor. One of the early PC NIX's that was very missed when the company went under. I was learning C on it when I found out it was all over for Coherent. What a great name for a NIX "Coherent". I really should transfer it to CD to preserve the bits. Sam. Mike Miller wrote: > On Tue, 10 May 2005, Sam MacDonald wrote: > >> a few dozen gigs appeared... >> >> That was just funny (not the server issue) but the statement "a few >> dozen gigs appeared" >> >> The days of a 286 running Coherent and a 40mb hard drive are just so >> much history. > > > > I remember sitting in a classroom in 1987 and hearing that it wouldn't > be long before we'd be talking about "gigabytes." I thought it was > true, but it was still amazing to dream about it. Now we're talking > about terabytes. > > Back in those days an older professor told me about his work in the > 1960s on an old computer that needed an HDD. They were storing > everything on cards. Reboots took a long time but were frequently > needed. So they managed to convince the university (UW-Madison) to > buy them an HDD. It was 1966 and the HDD cost $65,000. It held 2 MB > and I think it was as big as a washing machine. It probably seemed > like a lot of storage space at the time. > > I bought my first HDD in 1986. It cost me $450 and it held 30 MB > because it was a true 20 MB drive with an RLL controller that added > 50% to the volume. Back then 30 MB went a long, long way. You > *could* still do your work on two 360 KB 5.25" floppies (e.g., > WordPerfect 4.2 on one floppy and your data on the other), but it was > beginning to get uncomfortable. This was before I had a "high > density" floppy drive that held about 1.2 MB on a single 5.25" floppy > - that was luxurious! > > Mike >