From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Thu,  6 Apr 1995 00:57:54 -0400
From: rob@plan9.att.com rob@plan9.att.com
Subject: plan 9 and linux
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0adf2228-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950406045754.xYnqZaJfOKApjJcmfpTu2EVeHjewo5ma_5oMj5aqvD4@z>

Forsyth missed one important difference.  Plan 9 is not a PC operating
system, although it works on a PC.  As shipped, Plan 9 runs on four
instruction architectures (SPARC, MIPS, 68020, 386), with machines
from many vendors (Sun, SGI, Next, Mips, AT&T, and endless PC's).
The PC is an important platform for the system, but not the only one.
I've been thinking about it and I cannot recall any other system
that is shipped in one piece to run on a wide variety of platforms.
I may be wrong, but every other system I can think of is built for
one system and then ported to another; with Plan 9, the system is
carried along together for all architectures, compiled from one source
tree, etc.  It's really one system that runs on a variety of hardware,
rather than different versions with a common ancestor.

A related property is that it is configurable to run on anything from
a laptop to a network of multiprocessor servers.

So comparing it to Linux makes sense only for a narrow subset of
what the system is capable of.

For the record: in our lab version of the system, somewhat different
from what's going out, the window system compiles from C into
a ready-to-go executable in 4 seconds.  I don't think Linux can do
that.