Plan9 is dead. 12 years ago or so<br>there were internal distributions of<br>the system and a couple of manuals<br>at BTL. But all this was about the<br>time Linux started to get rolling. Many<br>of the OS people at BTL have either<br>
retired or gone to places like Google.<br>I doubt the current owners of BTL -<br>Alcatel, have much interest in supporting<br>things like Plan9 any more, even if it did<br>have any particular merit. The manuals<br>and the OS CD's might still be out there,<br>
but Plan9 was exploratory. The system<br>was fragmentary, and you were on your<br>own in terms of support.<br><br>There's a lot of history behind Unix and<br>AT&T, most of it bad. Unix made its debut<br>on Jan 1,1970, and already had most of the<br>
features its now noted for. But the brass<br>at AT&T never knew what they wanted to<br>do with it, and as a result basically ran it<br>in to the ground, eventually selling it for a<br>song when it was clear that Linux was going<br>
to take over. The good news is the BSD branch.<br><br>Had AT&T handled Unix intelligently, windoz<br>might never have happened. <br><br> -- Bob<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:awilliam@whitemice.org">awilliam@whitemice.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 08:48 -0400, <a href="mailto:peyeps@iserv.net">peyeps@iserv.net</a> wrote:<br>
> > Message: 5<br>
> > Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:50:26 -0400<br>
> > From: Michael Mol <<a href="mailto:mikemol@gmail.com">mikemol@gmail.com</a>><br>
> > Subject: [GRLUG] Plan 9<br>
> > To: <a href="mailto:grlug@grlug.org">grlug@grlug.org</a><br>
> > Message-ID:<br>
> > <<a href="mailto:f5e00c450907151950p53c9bbb7je4778f24d5c3b2b0@mail.gmail.com">f5e00c450907151950p53c9bbb7je4778f24d5c3b2b0@mail.gmail.com</a>><br>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"<br>
> > Would anyone happen to have the free time to delve deeply into playing<br>
> > around with and learning Plan 9? I'd like to learn more about it, but<br>
> > I don't really have the time to study up and experiment; I already<br>
> > have enough things brewing.<br>
</div>> Is there a link?<br>
<br>
I have an old link <<a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/" target="_blank">http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/</a>> but it is dead.<br>
I think the Plan 9 project has been at least moribund for a long time,<br>
and is probably dead. Plan 9 is the perfect example [agreed on my just<br>
about everyone] of solution-in-search-of-a-problem. Numerous bits from<br>
Plan 9 like clone and /proc have been absorbed into various other<br>
operating systems. If I recall correctly Plan 9's big 'feature' was<br>
everything-is-a-filesystem. Only all abstractions are leaky and there<br>
really is not compelling reason to deal with the leaks in order to<br>
pretend that some resource is a file or filesystem. One of the biggest<br>
gripes against UN*X was the 'arbitrary' ioctl() call but both BSD and<br>
LINUX have effectively eliminated those.<br>
<br>
I ran Plan 9 once, went "Huh, Ok?", and that was pretty much it. If<br>
someone really wants a blast-from-the-past that is interesting find a<br>
copy of NextSTEP/OpenSTEP [and hardware that can run it]. WOW! Was<br>
that ahead of its time (and *glacially* slow).<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
_______________________________________________<br>
grlug mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:grlug@grlug.org">grlug@grlug.org</a><br>
<a href="http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug" target="_blank">http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>