craig@usinset.inset.com (Craig Hubley) (02/08/90)
I am interested in finding out more about the "Plan 9" operating system/tools. (For those of you who've never heard of it, Plan 9 is a Bell Labs project to build a fast, fully distributed, cleanly-interfaced operating system that might fulfil the original Multics/Unix idea - a general-purpose computer operating system suitable for all applications. It follows on Bell Labs' v8 and v9 systems, but is not intended to be backwards-compatible with Unix (the film, "Plan 9 from Outer Space", made by master director Ed Wood Jr. in the 50s is all but universally acknowledged the worst film ever made, partly for its utter lack of continuity). This is a research project and not only is AT&T not presently planning to market it, but Bell Labs is not planning to release it to beta (they don't want to get into the same mess as with v7)). Unix Today (trade rag, October 2/89) quoted Ken Thompson as saying about Plan 9, "We'd like to see it take over the world." The article seemed to imply it had about 200 users and would be capable of supporting at least 1000 through a single instantiation of the OS, and that it was fast "can recompile the 40-to- 50-file Plan 9 kernel in eight seconds real-time" though they don't say on what machine. The information came from a New York Area Unix User's Group talk. I attended a similar talk on v8 and v9 in Toronto given by Henry Spencer, and he mentioned Plan 9 too. These talks and the Unix Today article are the only pointers I have seen to it. Thompson and (Rob) Pike are the only two names that I know are connected with it somehow, but I certainly don't want to bug the developers if there's an alternative source of information in print. Is there ? I am interested in what the actual user/programmer interfaces look like, and how they would fit into an object-oriented language, but not so much in how the system is implemented - I assume the interfaces are not secret, but of course I could be wrong... this is posted to comp.unix.wizards and comp.os.research (where followups are directed) because of the crossover and the fact that Unix people are most likely to know about this. Any pointers anyone can offer would be appreciated. I'll post the results if I get enough interest - please email your responses. Thanks, Craig Hubley craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.edu craig@usinset.inset.com
reggie@dinsdale.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) (02/10/90)
In article <1129@darkstar.ucsc.edu> craig@usinset.inset.com (Craig Hubley) writes: > >I am interested in finding out more about the "Plan 9" operating system/tools. The following are available to the general public: Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, Position Paper for IEEE Workshop on Operating Systems, Proceedings: Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, Cambridge, MA, November 5-6, 1987. Dave Presotto Networking for Plan 9 from Bell Laboratories Spring 1988 EUUG Conference, London, April 13-15, 1988. George W. Leach AT&T Paradyne (uunet|att)!pdn!reggie Mail stop LG-133 Phone: 1-813-530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 FAX: 1-813-530-8224 Largo, FL 34649-2826 USA
aho@decwrl.dec.com (Alex Ho) (07/29/90)
does anyone have additional information about plan 9 from bell labs? i have the 23 july unix today article. thanks alex aho@scam.berkeley.edu