Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 28th Jan 2006 17:11 UTC, submitted by ratatask
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."
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Member since:
2005-09-27
No, Plan 9 can be used in standalone systems(I for example run it on my laptop when I'm on the road, and it's used also in embedded systems where it's real time scheduler, low resource usage and great portability are very useful) but where it really shines is in a networked environment where it makes much easier to access and manage resources transparently over the network.
Want to play audio from your laptop thru the speakers in your desktop? No problem, just import /dev/audio from your desktop. Want to debug a program a user is running a few thousand km away? Just import their /proc filesystem.
All done transparently without need of any kind of special ad-hoc protocols, everything is a file, and no file is special, no stinking ioctls either.
Read the papers for more info: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/