The Mark Williams Company was a small software company in Chicago, Illinois (later moved to Northbrook, Illinois) that created Coherent, one of the first Unix-like operating systems for IBM PCs and several C programming language compilers. It was founded by Robert Swartz in 1980 and discontinued operations in 1995. The name comes from the middle name of Robert Swartz's father, William Mark Swartz.
Robert Swartz moved the company (originally producing a soft drink called Dr. Enuf) into software with his father's help and the company became known as the Mark Williams Company.
Mark Williams won a patent lawsuit centered around 'byte ordering'. Separately and at that time, Linux had made serious inroads in the UNIX clone market. Being that Coherent was a commercially available package and Linux was distributed freely on the Internet via their GNU public license, Coherent sales plummeted and Mr. Swartz had no choice but to cease operations in 1995.
Read more about Mark Williams Company: Products
Famous quotes containing the words mark, williams and/or company:
“Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?””
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 5:30.
“just like you sitting
there they come and talk to me, just the same.
They come to bother us. Why? I said I don’t
know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing.
Jealous, do you think? I don’t know.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)