Hooooo leeee shit. I have a friend who has been researching Plan9 and Inferno like, non-stop. We've talked a lot about how useful it'd be with a few additions and generally wondered why it didn't catch on? Damn he is going to love this and also hate it xD
God damn this would've seriously changed everything. Plan9 would've been a better internet
Plan 9 was Bell Labs' attempt to make UNIX more UNIX-like than UNIX, in order to replace UNIX. I was at AT&T when the first non-university releases came out, and they really couldn't explain what it was supposed to do that UNIX, GNU/LINUX, or any of the consumer desktop OSes didn't do already. It was just thing magical "thing" that was going to be everywhere in a few years, much like the FireWire ports that showed up on some of the newer (1990s) switching gear. I don't ever remember seeing this in operation anywhere in the Bell System, all of our equipment continued to run UNIX.
The one version I remember trying out worked on a server-client method, and the client didn't work without a connection to a server. I thought that was bullshit, said so, and didn't mess with it again. Would have been fine for an old mainframe infrastructure, but the mid-90s was the age of newly found mobility, and that just didn't work.
So, do you think of it differently in our newfound age of extreme connectivity?
Is bandwidth still a prevailing issue for distribution? Accessing remote files seems to be completely bottlenecked by this. Plan9 seems like "streaming" but with wider ranging consequences. The cloud before the cloud, kinda thing.
What do you mean by: ?
> The one version I remember trying out worked on a server-client method, and the client didn't work without a connection to a server. I thought that was bullshit, said so, and didn't mess with it again. Would have been fine for an old mainframe infrastructure, but the mid-90s was the age of newly found mobility, and that just didn't work.
The one live CD I had, I tried to boot it and it said something about being unable to locate the file server. I don't know if that was particular to this version, but that's all it would do - I could never get past that prompt. Admittedly, I haven't tried it for years, but again - it didn't do anything for me that other OSes didn't already cover, and it's been abandonware for so long now it's not of any use other than a historical curiosity. By the time Lucent got around to releasing it open source, the time had passed and Win2000 was looking at WinXP, and OS X 1.0 was on the horizon to replace the Crashy McCrasherson mess that was System $number on Mac.
I believe this system was primarily designed for a local system where you'd have desktops talking to a mainframe over some sort of system - ARCNET or Datakit, or the newly minted 10BaseT Ethernet that was cheap enough for consumer use. Lucent was still using ARCNET in the mid-90s when I left in 2001. It was on the TDMA microcells for the most part, I can't remember if the CDMA line used it or not.
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