Mark_Williams_Company
The Mark Williams Company was a small software company in Chicago, Illinois (later moved to Northbrook) 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 1977[1] and discontinued operations in 1995. The name comes from the middle name of Robert Swartz's father, William Mark Swartz.
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Robert Swartz moved the company (originally producing a soft drink called Dr. Enuf[2][3]) into software with his father's help and the company became known as the Mark Williams Company.
Mark Williams won a patent lawsuit (U.S. patent 4,956,809) centered on 'byte ordering'.[citation needed] Separately, and at that time,[when?] Linux had made serious inroads in the UNIX clone market. Since Coherent was a commercially available package and Linux was distributed freely on the Internet via their GNU public license, Coherent sales plummeted and Swartz had no choice but to cease operations in 1995.[citation needed]