[GRLUG] Plan 9

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 08:48 -0400, peyeps at iserv.net wrote:
> > Message: 5
> > Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:50:26 -0400
> > From: Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>
> > Subject: [GRLUG] Plan 9
> > To: grlug at grlug.org
> > Message-ID:
> > 	<f5e00c450907151950p53c9bbb7je4778f24d5c3b2b0 at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
> > Would anyone happen to have the free time to delve deeply into playing
> > around with and learning Plan 9?  I'd like to learn more about it, but
> > I don't really have the time to study up and experiment; I already
> > have enough things brewing.
> Is there a link?

I have an old link <http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/> but it is dead.
I think the Plan 9 project has been at least moribund for a long time,
and is probably dead.  Plan 9 is the perfect example [agreed on my just
about everyone] of solution-in-search-of-a-problem.  Numerous bits from
Plan 9 like clone and /proc have been absorbed into various other
operating systems.  If I recall correctly Plan 9's big 'feature' was
everything-is-a-filesystem.  Only all abstractions are leaky and there
really is not compelling reason to deal with the leaks in order to
pretend that some resource is a file or filesystem.  One of the biggest
gripes against UN*X was the 'arbitrary' ioctl() call but both BSD and
LINUX have effectively eliminated those.

I ran Plan 9 once, went "Huh, Ok?", and that was pretty much it.  If
someone really wants a blast-from-the-past that is interesting find a
copy of NextSTEP/OpenSTEP [and hardware that can run it].  WOW!  Was
that ahead of its time (and *glacially* slow).