[GRLUG] Plan 9

[Bob Kline]

Plan9 is dead.  12 years ago or so
there were internal distributions of
the system and a couple of manuals
at BTL.  But all this was about the
time Linux started to get rolling.  Many
of the OS people at BTL have either
retired or gone to places like Google.
I doubt the current owners of BTL -
Alcatel, have much interest in supporting
things like Plan9 any more,  even if it did
have any particular merit.  The manuals
and the OS CD's might still be out there,
but Plan9 was exploratory.  The system
was fragmentary, and you were on your
own in terms of support.

There's a lot of history behind Unix and
AT&T, most of it bad.  Unix made its debut
on Jan 1,1970, and already had most of the
features its now noted for.  But the brass
at AT&T never knew what they wanted to
do with it, and as a result basically ran it
in to the ground, eventually selling it for a
song when it was clear that Linux was going
to take over.  The good news is the BSD branch.

Had AT&T handled Unix intelligently,  windoz
might never have happened.

   -- Bob


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).
>
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