[mdlug] Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[David Relson]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:28:52 -0400
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> > So, has anyone else ever heard of this or used it? Here's[2] most
> > of the papers and here[3] is the official website in case anyone is
> > interested.
> 
> 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 by
> just about everyone] of solution-in-search-of-a-problem.  Numerous
> bits from Plan 9 like clone and /proc have been assimilated 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 no 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).

NextSTEP/OpenSTEP ran on several hardware platforms, including x86.

Perhaps the early 68000 systems were slow -- I don't know 'cause I
never used a NeXT 68000 pizza box.  I spent 3 yrs as a developer using
NeXTSTEP on Intel hardware and it was decently fast.  Of course that
was about 10 yrs ago and hardware was slower then now.

If you're interested in experimenting, GNUstep provides the UI (and
more) for Linux.

David