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Shout out to Plan 9 and Inferno. Two operating systems that were decades ahead of their times and who's distributed partitioning architecture and ideas are desp
by MisterTea 9y ago
Shout out to Plan 9 and Inferno. Two operating systems that were decades ahead of their times and who's distributed partitioning architecture and ideas are desperately needed in a networked world of ever increasing complexity, bloat, and protocols.
And I was a BeOS fan back in the day. Just stumbled across my old R5 box after cleaning out the attic. Very clever design for its time but didn't bring anything to the table in terms of networking, multi-user or distribution. It was a multimedia oriented, multi-threading speed demon and not much else.
- pmarreck 9y agoWas always fascinated by Plan9 and Inferno... from a distance. Way ahead of its time. I’m glad some of its ideas (probably notably UTF-8) made their way to more conventional OS’es.
- MisterTea 9y agoUTF8 is probably the least of them. The really good ideas such as the virtual file system, it's networked counterpart 9p, everything as a file including shared libraries (there is no dynamic linking in plan 9), per-process namespace partitioning (each process gets its own file system and you control what it sees), no root user, modular kernel and system components like CPU, DISK and AUTH services which can be ran on different systems, etc. Too many to name. Plan 9 was so far ahead of its time that I honestly think people just couldn't understand the need for such a powerful OS circa 1990 when the PC world was still on DOS, Apple was a niche, and Unix was something a Student or business professional used.