> dumb terminal > send a full screen to the user I think you're confusing Plan 9 with thin clients. Even the Blit in the video was a smart terminal ("you can

> dumb terminal > send a full screen to the user I think you're confusing Plan 9 with thin clients. Even the Blit in the video was a smart terminal ("you can run programs on it"). The way Plan 9 works is > send data to a user's computer and let local applications worry about dealing with the data. It was apparently different in the 90's ("terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it") but nowadays in Plan 9 you do nearly everything on the terminal. For different reasons: the WM, the browsers, the editors run on the terminal for responsiveness; image and music decoders run on the terminal because they need a higher bandwidth to the screen/speakers than to the fs (jpegs, mp3s, etc are compressed); plumber and factotum run on your terminal so that you get exactly one instance of them per session, and that they die as soon as you end your session. The central boxes are only really used for FS/backup, auth, cron, maybe mail servers or whatever. So nearly everything runs on the terminal, but it's a Plan 9 terminal so it's still just a matter of plug it in, turn it on, set up netbooting (once). > it's very obviously worse OUTSIDE of those institutions. What I was going to say before I decided that it was too much of a tangent was: and Plan 9 NOT being a proper distributed OS could be a plus: it's possible to use recover(4) or lapfs(4) and bring the laptop outside the network. No-one actually does that, and lapfs isn't even a real Plan 9 program in C. but it's still made feasible by the fact that your editor and so on is not on the far side of a connection and isn't going to go anywhere. unlike on e.g. an Amoeba terminal, which really is just a window manager, no editors locally, no browsers or viewers. I dunno about using "backup" to describe the Plan 9 file server, but that's even more unrelated to my original comment.