Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant:
"Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software."
It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business".
Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing.
$99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing.
Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
"Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software."
It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business".
Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing.
$99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing.
[1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...