[mdlug] Plan 9 from Bell Labs

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> 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).