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Plan 9 does have a userbase, albeit small it is >50 We have a GSoC entry http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ this year. Plan 9 is also used in some Lu

Plan 9 does have a userbase, albeit small it is >50 We have a GSoC entry http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ this year. Plan 9 is also used in some Lucent / Alcatel cell phone masts in RT mode. I know of three commercial companies with Plan 9 / Inferno based products. Plan 9 was a for sale product when free Unices became the rage. When it became a free download, Plan 9 landed without a modern web browser in the days of the Web and we still don't have one. Until recently, with the addition of an AC97 driver, the only way to get sound was an 8 bit Soundblaster or difficult to find specific models of USB audio device. There's no video playback (unless you don't care if the sound syncs). So you end up needing two machines and only one of them expects to be just another node in the network and the other thinks it's the sentinel.

cturner 17y ago
Thanks for the reply. 9vx looks promising. I'm surprised that acceptance of the browser is so global, but particularly in a community like yours. HTML is dirty, HTML+CSS+javascript is dirty. Plan 9 folks know about tool simplicity, and about nice documents. I've always half expected something to come from your team that says "no - this is all wrong. The browsable internet should be like this" that gives the middle finger to the HTML world, and which can easily be replicated as a firefox plugin and then go on to take over the world. I guess I'm saying that I think you took the wrong path by attempting to follow the browser - you should have challenged it, but in a way that didn't rely on plan9-specific user interface innovations [1]. I've had several attempts at it but don't hang around in circles where I get to talk about the problems regularly face-to-face with other people who get it, and that's what a problem like that requires. The site you've pointed me to is a real improvement over the online docs that were around two years ago. It answers the sort of questions a newcomer asks. -- [1] I think sam would have gone further if the console tool had been the core with the gui as a separate app that leveraged the core. Console sam should be to ed as vim is to vi, but it's trying to do two things at once, and the gui editor - which I'm sure is very good for people who know it well - hampered the progress of the console app.
- skwiddor 17y ago
  We're always saying to each other, HTML + CSS is wrong. We like PDF & PS & troff and plumbing on http://example.com/cod.pdf http://example.com/cod.pdf will open it in the pdf viewer. fmthtml turns web pages into plain text. But ignoring the majority of web content is really not an option. HTML can be pretty lightweight, we do have some renderers that do HTML3 and a subset of CSS really well and there's also Abaco that does a good job with HTML4, we've even got a canvas widget! We could probably port WebKit if only we had a native C++ compiler but the incentive to do that is pretty low, we've got other cool beans to play with and you can pick up a dedicated Web browsing machine is less than the price of a round of drinks.

cturner 17y ago

Thanks for the reply. 9vx looks promising. I'm surprised that acceptance of the browser is so global, but particularly in a community like yours. HTML is dirty, HTML+CSS+javascript is dirty. Plan 9 folks know about tool simplicity, and about nice documents. I've always half expected something to come from your team that says "no - this is all wrong. The browsable internet should be like this" that gives the middle finger to the HTML world, and which can easily be replicated as a firefox plugin and then go on to take over the world. I guess I'm saying that I think you took the wrong path by attempting to follow the browser - you should have challenged it, but in a way that didn't rely on plan9-specific user interface innovations [1]. I've had several attempts at it but don't hang around in circles where I get to talk about the problems regularly face-to-face with other people who get it, and that's what a problem like that requires. The site you've pointed me to is a real improvement over the online docs that were around two years ago. It answers the sort of questions a newcomer asks. -- [1] I think sam would have gone further if the console tool had been the core with the gui as a separate app that leveraged the core. Console sam should be to ed as vim is to vi, but it's trying to do two things at once, and the gui editor - which I'm sure is very good for people who know it well - hampered the progress of the console app.

skwiddor 17y ago
We're always saying to each other, HTML + CSS is wrong. We like PDF & PS & troff and plumbing on http://example.com/cod.pdf http://example.com/cod.pdf will open it in the pdf viewer. fmthtml turns web pages into plain text. But ignoring the majority of web content is really not an option. HTML can be pretty lightweight, we do have some renderers that do HTML3 and a subset of CSS really well and there's also Abaco that does a good job with HTML4, we've even got a canvas widget! We could probably port WebKit if only we had a native C++ compiler but the incentive to do that is pretty low, we've got other cool beans to play with and you can pick up a dedicated Web browsing machine is less than the price of a round of drinks.