[GRLUG] Plan 9

[Matt Michielsen]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Adam Tauno Williams <
awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:

> 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).
>

I also ran it on like a 200MHz box way back in the day.  It was interesting,
but it didn't really do anything that linux couldn't, even back then.

-mm
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