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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
- chovybizzass 6y agoWhat's Plan9?
- 6pac3rings 6y agoThe Plan9 abstractions give me the impression you can network as One the top 5 superduper computers and get beyond the benchmark metrics that haven't given us machines as intelligent and sensible as 3 to 7yo.
- Angostura 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The final official release was in early 2015. Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem, and the cursor-addressed, terminal-based I/O at the heart of UNIX-like operating systems is replaced by a windowing system and graphical user interface without cursor addressing, although rc, the Plan 9 shell, is text-based.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thesuitonym 6y agoImagine if everything they told you about Unix was true. Plan 9 is the operating system Bell Labs made after Unix, to fix many of the problems the designers saw. That said, it's based around what the designers of Plan 9 thought were problems with Unix. It's a very opinionated operating system. But it has so many ideas that were ahead of their time, and in many ways are still lightyears beyond what we have now. It's a really cool piece of computing history, and if you haven't tried it, I suggest you look into it, but keep in mind that even though it looks and sometimes feels like Unix, it very much is not. It's not terribly useful as a daily driver OS due to a lack of software, but it's very, very cool.
- rakoo 6y agoThe interesting conclusion of all this is that if everything looks like a file, then it doesn't matter what OS it runs on. A /dev/screen can be on your local Plan 9, on a remote Windows or on your Linux VPS; as long as it respects the protocol it doesn't matter. Plan 9 is the host of all this experiment but its findings can be (and have been) imported in other places.
- dale_glass 6y agoIs that actually useful in practice? When you're talking about things like displays, performance is extremely important. We're talking about 178MB/s to update a full HD screen at 30 fps, which requires networking pretty much no normal user has.
- floren 6y agoIn my work, there's not much which requires updating a full HD screen at 30 fps... video calls, I suppose. Everything else updates small portions of the screen at lower rates. There's a program called drawterm which implements Plan 9 graphics devices on Linux. You run drawterm locally, connecting to a Plan 9 system, and your applications on the Plan 9 system draw to your drawterm window over the network. I regularly run it at 4k and it performs quite well.
- cycloptic 6y agoI'm guessing these applications do not have any kind of animations or smooth scrolling? That would be a simple test, make your web browser or your image viewer fullscreen in 4K and see if there is lag in the scrolling/panning/zooming.
- hnedeotes 6y agoThere's been some post about upscaling algorithms here lately, perhaps they could be used for diminishing the required bandwidth?
- effie 6y ago
- CalChris 6y agoIt’s a file.
- goatinaboat 6y agoYou’re a file
- de6u99er 6y agoI scream, you scream, we scream for ice cream.
- Shared404 6y agoCan I be a file?
- andrewflnr 6y agoYou're a file! And you're a file! Everyone is a file!
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoNot everyone can echo > ctl though
- Koshkin 6y agoA person is a phile, not 'file.'
- goatinaboat 6y agoI don’t know why this is flagged, I’m observing the point that a user, like everything else, is a file
- Someone 6y agoFTA: “Starting in the late 1980s, a group led by Rob Pike and UNIX co-creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed Plan 9. Their motivation was two-fold: to build an operating system that would fit an increasingly distributed world, and to do so in a clean and elegant manner. The plan was not to build directly on the Unix foundation but to implement a new design from scratch. The result was named Plan 9 from Bell Labs – the name an inside joke inspired by the cult B-movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Plan 9 is built around a radically different model from that of conventional operating systems. The OS is structured as a collection of loosely coupled services, which may be hosted on different machines. Another key concept in its design is that of a per-process name space: services can be mapped on to local names fixed by convention, so that programs using those services need not change if the current services are replaced by others providing the same functionality.“
- nosianu 6y ago> inspired by the cult B-movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space." It's of course not relevant in the current context but still fun so I dare add that it is famous because it's so bad. It's known as "worst movie ever". It is worth watching the start and a few scenes - even if one does not have the patience for the whole thing - just for some laughs. It already starts (4 minutes in) with a scene in a hilarious airplane cockpit, which does not look like one at all (those controls..!). The zombies are really funny too. Full movie: https://youtu.be/Ln7WF78PolA https://youtu.be/Ln7WF78PolA
- Koshkin 6y agoMaybe the "worst" but at least it's not boring like some more recent big-budget ones are. (Incidentally, there's some enjoyment to be had watching B-rated movies from the late 50s to the 80s.)
- Someone 6y agoComparing https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/reviews https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/reviews (“Plan 9 from outer space? reviews) with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/reviews https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/reviews (“Manos: the hands of death” reviews), I don’t think it qualifies as “worst movie ever”. One of the reviewers of ‘Manos’ says: “What can I say about a movie so bad that it makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Casablanca?”, another “I have endured a thing or two in my life: Plan 9 from outer space. Hercules against the moon men. Godzilla versus Megalon. German musical comedies from the early sixties. However, THIS was too much for me. About one hour or so into the movie, I quit.”
- MisterTea 6y agohttps://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s14/lectures/L31_P9.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s14/lectures/L31_P9.pdf Well explained in this PDF.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shp0ngle 6y agoNokia is still around? ...didn't they get bought by Microsoft and then jumped off a cliff? Well I guess someone is still paying for Qt so I guess they still are around
- milliams 6y agoNokia sold Qt
- vesinisa 6y agoNokia is a communications conglomerate. They sold the mobile phone manufacturing division to Microsoft in 2014. They still have large operations in other networking technologies. Qt has also since been sold off and is being again developed by Trolltech, now known just as Qt Company.
- isaacimagine 6y agoI'm reading this on a Nokia!
- distances 6y agoThat's part of their current business: the name is licensed for HMD Global, which then outsources production to Foxconn. It's Nokia in name only, literally. Seem to be very good phones though.
- isaacimagine 6y agoYeah, the phones run Android One (so stock android, no bloat), and pretty solid in terms of construction (not 3310 level, but I've dropped it a number of times and it still seems to be working well).
- zozbot234 6y agoUnfortunately it seems that HMD's Nokia phones do not support OEM boot unlock, unlike many other Android One models. So no running Plan9 on your Nokia phone.
- milliams 6y agoSpecifically, it seems to be under the MIT license.
- lupinglade 6y agoGood choice. A truly open source license.
- _lffv 6y agoTwitter announcement: https://twitter.com/plan9foundation/status/1374350472316817416 https://twitter.com/plan9foundation/status/13743504723168174... Plan 9 Foundation: https://p9f.org/ https://p9f.org/ Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs There's still a pretty active community around Plan 9, too. 9Front, a popular fork of Plan 9: http://9front.org/ http://9front.org/ Interviews with some Plan 9 community members: https://0intro.dev/ https://0intro.dev/ Some videos: [A Tour of Acme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M), [Peertube channel of sigrid's](https://diode.zone/video-channels/necrocheesecake/videos https://diode.zone/video-channels/necrocheesecake/videos)
- ori_b 6y agoPlan 9 is also participating in GSOC this year. http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html
- JAlexoid 6y agoI've seen Plan 9 in GSoC multiple times, now. I personally learned about it from GSoC many years ago.
- choppaface 6y agoRob Pike filled all the application spots himself.
- AceJohnny2 6y agowith assistance from Russ Cox
- _joel 6y agohttps link timing out for me http://p9f.org/ http://p9f.org/
- mapcars 6y agoAllright, but isn't it like 20 year late? And does this contain any interesting parts which are not already in 9fans/9front build?
- rakoo 6y agoThe cynical view is that it is now official Plan 9 cannot be used to make money anymore, so waiving away the remaining monopoly rights one may have over it is free positive publicity
- butterisgood 6y agoAnd yet Coraid has a Plan 9 based product for ATA over Ethernet.
- sciurus 6y agoI thought they were dead, but it seems they're back. https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/26/coraids_athenian_resurrection/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/26/coraids_athenian_resu...
- rakoo 6y agoAre they using Plan 9 as a commodity (in which case it could be replaced by another OS at the cost of redevelopping their added value) or are they selling Plan 9 as a product ?
- moonchild 6y ago9front continues to be developed, and though all its changes are permissively licensed, the whole is still gpl'd for obvious reasons. This allows 9front's code to be opened up.
- erikpukinskis 6y agoMost big ideas have cyclical openings where they can be applied. Kind of like a Mars transfer window. So, if something had a window 20 years ago, but didn’t get applied, there’s a good chance that another window has opened up.
- offtop5 6y agoLooks like they have a Raspberry Pi version. Might try to see what it can do this weekend. I've always wanted to see more OSes , there has to be a different way of doing things then the Unix/Linux / BSD OSX or Windows operating systems
- MisterTea 6y agoMillers pi supports wifi, 9front does not[1]. Though 9front is probably more newbie friendly as it has a little more polish and a the FQA/docs have been improving greatly as of late. 1. Millers wifi implementation is different than 9fronts wifi so a lot of work needs to be done to get Rich's driver working on 9front. Patches welcome :-)
- dylan604 6y ago>FQA/docs Frequently Questioned Answers???
- cat199 6y agoindeed. http://fqa.9front.org/ http://fqa.9front.org/ 9front is peppered with extremely dry sarcasm, to the point of controversy (http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.0.1 http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.0.1)
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoBeing distributed operating system can I build a RPi cluster with just plan9 installed for distributed computing tasks?
- MisterTea 6y agoYes. You can boot the entire cluster from a single file server running on any other plan 9 machine be it pi, pc, VM, whatever. Each node boots from the same root file system so each node has the same fs view. This is where ndb[1] comes in Though you can change this any way you see fit. Network booting can be accomplished via pxe or a plan 9 kernel on sd with a plan9.ini configured to automatically pull root via tls or tcp. have a look at thread(2)[2] and enjoy Go like channels and concurrency cleanly built on top of the nice pan 9 c library. You could just use Go but we dont have Go on pi yet, that's a google SOC 2021 project if anyone is interested. 1. http://man.postnix.pw/plan_9/6/ndb http://man.postnix.pw/plan_9/6/ndb 2. http://man.postnix.pw/plan_9/2/thread http://man.postnix.pw/plan_9/2/thread
- JulianMorrison 6y agoIf you used Go in the very earliest days, you'll recognise pieces of its toolchain in Plan 9.
- floren 6y agoYears back, I tweaked the Plan 9 kernel source so it could compile with Go's C toolchain. After a day or two it was booting, but we decided not to use it... I think the end conclusion was that the Go team was (reasonably) only interested in maintaining the compilers for building Go, and that they could at any time make changes that would break our builds.
- mcdevilkiller 6y agoEven the logo has some resmblance
- ethhics 6y agoBoth made by Renée French, wife of Rob Pike!
- kencausey 6y agoWho were, I believe, brought together by Penn Jillette.
- earthboundkid 6y agoIn the photo with the article, Rob a) has hair and b) dresses just like Penn. Wild times in New Jersey…
- bigbizisverywyz 6y agoI think Tom Duff of Duff's device fame is also there, 3rd from left at the back.
- knolan 6y agoThat’s nice and all but I’m still salty about how Nokia shuttered Bell Labs Ireland last year. So many close friends lost their jobs.
- dave84 6y agoI hadn't heard, it doesn't seem to have generated much press coverage now that I'm giving it a Google.
- knolan 6y agoIt was kept remarkably quiet. That site in particular received a lot of support from the IDA over the years so I can't imagine they were too happy about it. BLI was told year on year that it was a top performing site. Then a few months into lockdown they pulled the rug out from under everyone.
- kingosticks 6y agoWere they working on products? Any examples?
- knolan 6y agoI’d already left a couple of years. Most Bell Labs stuff is closer to research than development anyway.
- kingosticks 6y agoThat's what i thought also which is why I was curious it was considered top performing. I suppose there are metrics other than profitability to define performance.
- knolan 6y agoKPIs related to patents, academic papers, contributions to various projects and yes technologies for products. The Irish site was always aware of its isolation from the mothership and usually went above and beyond.
- williesleg 6y agoWhy does this horse shit keep showing up here? Everybody hated AT&T's shit license back then, and now it's freeware? or more like free open source abandonware. 30 years too late, pal.
- gpvos 6y agoI had no idea that Nokia had bought Bell Labs.
- stagger87 6y agoMore specifically, Nokia bought the parent company of Bell labs, Alcatel-Lucent.
- DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii 6y agoTo provide more context, Alcatel-Lucent was a merger of the French Alcatel and Lucent. And Lucent was formed when AT&T divested technology business units including Western Electric and Bell Labs.
- flyinghamster 6y agoTo go further, in the 1920s, AT&T[0] was required to divest its international operations, which were sold to newly-formed ITT. Much of those assets eventually went to Alcatel. [0] the original pre-1984 AT&T, not Southwestern Bell d/b/a AT&T
- the_only_law 6y agoI have a bunch of old telecom / networking / engineering equipment from mostly the 80s-90s and it’s always fun to figure out who owns or owned some IP or product.
- gpvos 6y agoIn 2015 apparently, says wikipedia.
- neilv 6y agoKudos to Nokia on a great move.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoDoes this include sam?
- fhs 6y agoYes, of course. Acme also.
- knorker 6y agoIt 503's, or when it loads has a blank page. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoAFAIK, the mighty still have to cope with the systems that won the popularity contest.
- dangerbird2 6y agoHN hug of death
- varispeed 6y agoI wish the so called open source projects were more inclusive. Many people would love to work on these projects, but are unable to because they need to have a paid employment to pay bills and feed family. Open Source projects give a platform for people from privileged background to show off their skills plus they are reducing the amount of work available. For example company won't hire someone to do X if they can find an open source project that does something like X. Big corporations are also exploiting those projects and make billions off of them while paying developers nothing. In some countries work for free is illegal and a person doing the work needs to be given at least a minimum wage. Companies who use such software are essentially getting labour without paying for it. We need to think about royalty system that will be reimbursing people working on those projects and creating a level playing field so people from poor backgrounds could also participate.
- Aloha 6y agoHow do you propose open source projects get the revenue to offer a royalty program? Also, in what countries is volunteering for free illegal?
- harwoodleon 6y agoWell there’s https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ Not royalties, but dues at least. A DAO structure would work well, but not many people seem to see it as viable.
- varispeed 6y agoRoyalties should be based on % of revenue generated by a product where particular software is being used and distributed among contributors. You are conflating volunteering with internship. If a company recruits volunteers as software developers, this is a disguised internship and they'll get themselves liable. This is illegal in the UK.
- Aloha 6y agoand if the open source project generates no revenue? Like, if Y is controlled by the Y foundation which is in part funded by Z company, Y foundation isnt really getting a direct revenue stream from the software - thats the thing about open source software, you dont have a say in how its used, and you cannot force payment. I think your read of the law on what is or isnt an internship is a wee bit of a hot take, but IANAL, and certainly not a UK Labor Lawyer.
- pengaru 6y ago> That community is organizing itself bottom-up into the new Plan 9 Foundation, which is making the OS code publicly available under a suitable open-source software license. Didn't bell-labs already make the source available under the GPL years ago? Why is this necessary?
- sitharus 6y agoThe source was available but the project was essentially dead. You could fork but contributing upstream was hard. This removes the corporate roadblocks and lets plan9 exist but itself.
- nix23 6y agoRight, this is why 9front and 9legacy came up and both are pretty well maintained, i hope they (9front) migrate the code "back" to Plan9, would be amazing to have one single point of development.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- justin66 6y agoBell Labs permitted UC Berkeley to fork and distribute Plan 9 under the GPL, but the main repository was still under the Lucent Public License or something weird like that. Relicensing under the MIT license will maximize the number of people who can use the code, even if the foundation they created does not catch on.
- nabla9 6y agoHuh. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike invented UTF-8. TIL. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt >So we went to dinner, Ken figured out the bit-packing, and when we came back to the lab after dinner we called the X/Open guys and explained our scheme. We mailed them an outline of our spec, and they replied saying that it was better than theirs (I don't believe I ever actually saw their proposal; I know I don't remember it) and how fast could we implement it? I think this was a Wednesday night and we promised a complete running system by Monday, which I think was when their big vote was. >So that night Ken wrote packing and unpacking code and I started tearing into the C and graphics libraries. The next day all the code was done and we started converting the text files on the system itself. By Friday some time Plan 9 was running, and only running, what would be called UTF-8. We called X/Open and the rest, as they say, is slightly rewritten history.
- henvic 6y ago2021: the year of the plan9 desktop https://twitter.com/j3sj3sj3s/status/1374375432452116485 https://twitter.com/j3sj3sj3s/status/1374375432452116485
- haolez 6y agoPlan9 is the definite proof that Worse is Better[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- mseepgood 6y agoSure, Unix and Linux are worse than Plan 9, but I don't think that's the reason why they are more popular.
- haolez 6y agoThat's not the point of Worse is Better. The point is that, in this context, Unix and Linux are better than Plan 9, but for non-intuitive reasons.
- discreteevent 6y agoWorse is better is just annoying. Better at what? Domino's pizza is better at market share. It's not better at making good pizza. Most people can agree with these two statements. But just saying "Domino's is proof that worse is better" causes unnecessary arguments
- samatman 6y agoPizza has weak network effects. The capitalization, brand recognition, and streamlined corporate franchise structure, cooperate to make it easier to launch and run a Domino's franchise, than to start a pizza joint from scratch. But not that much easier. There is plenty of room to market better pizza for more money. Computer systems tend to have strong network effects, there's a lot to learn and a skilled developer is, ceteris paribus, more productive than a greenhorn. Most of the value in operating systems and programming languages is in the ecosystem rather than the core. Worse is better isn't a universal solvent, there are plenty of areas where it isn't applicable. The original essay† is about why C and Unix were eating Lisp's lunch, and is worth reading. † https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/LispGoodNewsBadNews.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/LispGoodNewsBadNews.pdf
- nonbirithm 6y agoI wonder what Stanley Lieber would think.
- samtregar3 6y agoI was surprised nobody mentioned the OS they built next, after Plan 9 - Inferno: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) That's the one I've used and it was pretty cool. Limbo was a fun little scripting language.
- rcarmo 6y agoHmmm. Might be coincidence, but today I noticed Inferno was back on GitHub as well (it had been living on Bitbucket): https://github.com/inferno-os/inferno-os https://github.com/inferno-os/inferno-os This is great news altogether - I've been dabbling with Plan9 for a fair bit (mostly on Raspberry Pis of late as they are nicer "disposable" machines and I have plenty of them), so am hopeful that this will lead to more modern versions (especially something whose UX does not rely on mouse chording, which is a chore on modern machines).
- samtregar3 6y agoInferno was fun back in the day - Limbo is a neat language with some interesting features.
- nine_k 6y agoIf inferno took up, it could fulfill the original promise of Java. Many approaches are quite similar between them — but Inferno also had working relocation of processes between hosts, and well-working IPC ("RMI") out of the box.
- pjmlp 6y agoJava had it via Jini, pity it didn't took off. And I rather use Swing than Tk. Now one thing I agree is that it was Android done properly.
- nix23 6y agoWOW, thank you very much Nokia!! Having said that..i installed 3 days ago a 9front "cluster", 2x RPI3 as cpu server 1x RPI2 with 2 external HD's (2x7TB) as Storage Server 1x RPI2 (down-clocked) as Auth Server Love it to work and play with it.
- MyrtleTook 6y agoI don't understand how the "everything is a file" could apply for everything in practice. For example, Linux has ioctl(), which in practice are like a side channel. Granted, Linux doesn't apply this API philosophy too thoroughly. I guess the "everything is a file" might have multiple meanings. For example: (1) Everything is represented by a (file) descriptor (2) Same as (1) and the descriptor has a file-like API (think read(), seek(), write(), etc.) (3) Everything is an "byte addressable blob of bytes" Meaning (1) is OK. But it doesn't tell nothing about the API the (file) descriptor itself would use. It could be a fixed set (like meaning (2)), or be variable depending on something else (like the (file) descriptor type). Meaning (2) looks like too restrictive and inefficient to me and is the one I really have trouble accepting as a general OS primitive. Meaning (3) surely can't be used for everything in practice, right? It's just to generic like "every computer architecture can be emulated by a universal turing machine." And it also seems too inefficient. But it could be very useful if the blob of bytes had an API like (2) or any other, including having an API depending of the "file type". Is option (3) that folks are meaning when talking about "everything is/should be a file"? EDIT: formatted the meaning list correctly.
- yiyus 6y agoIt's basically your second option. In Plan 9, everything is a file server that presents a file system interface that speaks the 9P protocol.
- Isamu 6y agoI agree with you. A type amounts to the sum of operations that are valid on an object conforming to that type. A file object is a very basic, general type, that allows open, read bytes, write bytes, close, maybe seek, maybe some ops are restricted (read-only, write-only) etc. I don’t think it is generally appreciated how far it gets you to have a unifying simple interface. You can always add a complex one, you know?
- bogomipz 6y agoIt's interesting both of you had different answers. I realize that the streams interface was a Sys V thing but would the Unix's "everything is a file" generally be option (2) in the OPs comment then? I feel like I've heard the phrase so much and just always assumed it was (2.)
- throwaway823882 6y agoA lot of people miss the fact that Plan 9 was a real distributed operating system. It's not just UNIX with a couple features ("ooh everything is a file" "ooh UTF8"). You can effortlessly execute any program across multiple hosts on a network. You can use any resource of any host on the network, including files, processes, graphics, networks, disks. It all just works like magic, using a single message-oriented protocol. If Linux worked like this today, you would not need Kubernetes. You could run systemd on a single host and it would just schedule services across all the hosts on the network. Namespaces would already be independent and distributed, so containers would only be used for their esoteric features (network address translation, chroot environment, image layers). Configurations, files, secrets, etc would just be regular files that any process in any container on any host could access using regular permissions models. About 50 layers of abstraction BS would disappear. I think because nobody's actually seen how it can work, they can't imagine it being this simple.
- bombela 6y agoSingle point of failure comes to mind though.
- PuercoPop 6y agoWhy? There isn't a centralized message queue. Its just everything uses the same abstraction and is presented as filesystem or a file.
- hashkb 6y ago> systemd on a single host How would a HA Plan 9 deployment handle disappearance of the "leader"?
- viraptor 6y agoThe way I understand it, Plan9 provides the basics, so you can delegate to external nodes over 9P. But it doesn't provide an orchestration solution, so the answer would be "HA Plan 9 deployment" is not a thing - you'd need an extra layer. Unless I missed something while researching P9 years ago.
- nine_k 6y agoPlan9 and Inferno are shining examples of not being opened early enough. They could conquer the world, but their licences were not open enough at the critical time, and technically inferior but open Linux ate their lunch, along with the dinner.
- gavodavo 6y agoAs someone who wanted to use 9front as a toy OS for a bit, this makes me excited.
- lsllc 6y agoThere's still hope for Taos then? https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byte-articles/the-taos-operating-system-1991?hn https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...
- b1nj0y 6y agothis sounds as a Kubernetes.
- ofrzeta 6y agoYes, now just port Docker to Plan 9.
- glangdale 6y agoGreat. Now all it needs is a functioning "APE" ("ANSI Posix Environment"), which, iirc was built by Tom Duff and sadly neglected ever since. Once P9 gets over its insane NIH syndrome (or IHBBTWP, "Invented Here But By The Wrong Person", i.e. Stroustrup) it could maybe do some weird stuff like, I dunno, run a web browswer? I vividly remember people in the Unix room moving to a PC (running Windows?) to browse the web, ffs. Back in '94.
- nix23 6y agoIt (9front) has two browsers, but no c++ for obvious reasons.
- glangdale 6y agoWhich browsers? As far as I'm aware, there are multiple things that can kinda-sorta browse the web, for some value of "browse" and "web", but I'm not aware of anything a normal person would recognize as a web browser.
- nix23 6y agoMothra and Abaco. >but I'm not aware of anything a normal person would recognize as a web browser. Same could be said about hackernews (no facebook or twitter look...not even hashtag's), so be happy you are not "normal".
- jibanes 6y ago9reat!
- gonzus 6y agoPlan 9 elicits in my head the same kind of thoughts as Lisp -- I find them both extremely appealing on an intellectual level, and can't help but wonder why there isn't more of them around in the "real world". As a software developer, my main use of my computer is writing / building / running code and surfing the web, mostly in read-only mode but also to interact with others via stuff like slack. I have always wondered how difficult it would be to make Plan 9 a viable platform for these requirements, and why this is not so today (or maybe it is and I just don't know where to look): does the difficulty lie in porting programs that already run on other operating systems? Are there other, deeper reasons? Is it possible today to run stuff like vim, gcc / g++, python, java, node, zig, rust, firefox on Plan 9? If not, is it possible to port these, or are there fundamental architectural reasons against it? Note: I am willing and happy to try other paradigms, such as acme for editing, but also find it quite baffling that, if it is technically possible, you could not install vim / emacs / vscode alongside acme.
- drybjed 6y agoThere is a port of vim for Plan 9[1], I think it should be included in 9front as well. [1]: https://vmsplice.net/9vim.html https://vmsplice.net/9vim.html
- Lichtso 6y ago> Can't help but wonder why there isn't more of them around in the "real world". I think the biggest strength (and weakness) of the ideas both present in LISP and Plan9 is the consistency and internal integration. And, I see two big challenges with that. One is technical: It is not that easy to reinvent everything and do it in such a way that makes it more consistent than existing systems. If we believe Conway's law such an effort would require a team as small as possible, optimally just a single person. Note that Plan9 for example does not fully integrate, the programming language and standard library are not composed of the same building blocks as the underlying system, there is a divide there. The second is economical / political: While such a consistency and internal integration is desired by the users and developers, it is not very beneficial to business. Image if all components were actually integrated with one another. How would management divide that into projects? How would you make marketable products from it? How would you implement your branding and vendor lock-in? Where would SaaS and subscription models fit in?
- ofrzeta 6y agoThat eccentric idea of calling the window system "8½" ... Back in the day when I was trying out Plan9 I spent a whole lot of time figuring out how to enter that on a keyboard.
- vinnytroia 6y agoI hate black people