* Plan 9: The future
@ 1994-03-04 3:25 Vijay
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From: Vijay @ 1994-03-04 3:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
First of all: A minor gripe. I made the mistake of installing sam and
giving the plan 9 papers (all of them) to the programmers at the place
where I work. After a month, I was approached by the manager of our
programmers asking if I could install plan 9 on the machines as he was
getting tired of hearing the constant demands for more plan 9 stuff from
them. Apparently the set up that I am in charge of (3 6 processor
AViiONS, with 1 gig of ram, 36 gig Clariion disk arrays, optical juke
boxes etc with a lot of the smaller Aviions on the programmers desks + the
odd DEC 3000 Alpha box) maps well into the plan 9 model and it turns out
that the programmers seem to agree with what the designers of plan 9 had
to say. They use sam exclusively now and want more of the same. I was
sitting in a meeting for 2 hours today trying to convince them that as
yet, they could not get plan 9 and trying to calm down 8 irate
programmers dosed on caffine is not a task for the faint of heart. A
heartfelt request from me. Please make plan 9 available. Please. I
don't do much programming, my forte is adminstration, but plan 9 seems to
have hit our programmers where it counts and they are starting to make
it a bit hot for me. Our manager is willing to pay for plan 9 and pay
well. The crowning touch came when I showed them the letter Bob
Kummerfield wrote about the time he attended INET93 and used his Compaq
LTE in San Francisco to get the same exact environment (including
CPU/file servers) there as he does in Australia. Our people would pay
kill for that. Without saying more, I would venture that we pay AT&T
well in the 6 figures per year for leased lines for our product installed
in New Jersey ;)
Ok, so it was not a minor gripe.
On to more, bigger better things. I was reading over Andy Tannenbaum's
papers on Amoeba, some papers on Chorus MiiX, and QNX (my other favourite
operating system) and I was struck by how easy they make it to have multi
computers with SSS (Single Site Semantics). A group of non shared memory
cpu modules on a backplane acting as one computer. This would grow to
include hundreds of CPU's, whereas the shared memory computers start to
run out of bandwidth after a few dozen or so. Is there support for plan 9
for something like this?
And finally: What next for plan 9? What do the designers of plan 9
envison next?
--
Vijay Gill |The (paying) customer is always right.
wrath@cs.umbc.edu | - Piercarlo Grandi
vijay@gl.umbc.edu | Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get
These are my opinions only. | sucked into jet engines.
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1994-03-04 3:25 Plan 9: The future Vijay
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