[mdlug] Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[Jonathan Billings]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:19:55PM +0000, Jacob Todd wrote:
> Has anyone experimented with Plan 9 from Bell Labs? I discovered it a couple
> of months ago and have been reading excessively about it's design ever since.
> It's meant to be the successor to UNIX, and to quote the paper Designing
> Plan 9[1]:

I've played with it.  In fact, it was used in some Systems classes for
teaching OS-level coding.  It's got some really neat ideas, I knew a
professor who referred to it as "...like unix, only more so."

I had also used Inferno, which came from plan9, which I just
discovered is now Open Source: 
http://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/

Plan9 (and inferno) are fun to play with, but I never really found
them to be useful to *do* anything.

I do recall a really cool thing you could do is mount a remote
system's equivilant of /dev to a local directory, and use it with
local programs, so the audio program could play music on the remote
system's sound card and speakers.  neat.

Also, I really liked 'acme', the text editor/user interface. 

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>