SHADES OF ED WOOD

[Jerry L. Pearson jpearson@handel.jlc.net]

Short article for the interest of this group...

-Industry Watch- section of HP Professional magazine...
September 1995 issue, page 11, by George A. Thompson


_SHADES OF ED WOOD_

"Did you ever think that UNIX might have been a technology left behind by
extraterrestrial IS managers? Then get ready for Plan 9. In July, the
Computer Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories announced the
availability of Plan 9, an operating system named after the science-fiction
cult movie _Plan 9 From Outer Space_.

        Plan 9 takes advantage of three basic technical ideas: all the
system objects present themselves as named files that are manipulated by
read/write operations; all these files may exist either locally or remotely
and respond to a standard protocol; the file system name space (set of
objects visible to a program) is dynamically and individually adjustable for
each of the programs running on a particular machine. While the first two
ideas have been foreshadowed in UNIX, the third is new.

        Although developed by the group that developed UNIX, C, and C++
(including Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson who developed UNIX in 1969), Plan
9 _is not a replacement for UNIX. It is a new design._

        Plan 9 runs on the Intel 386/486/Pentium, MIPS and SPARC and
Motorola 68020 platforms. It also supports symmetric multiprocessing.

        Plan 9 (entire source code; two volume manual) is available on
CD-ROM for $350. Also included are four PC disks containing a binary-only
version for demonstrations. For more information call (800) 462-8146 (in the
United States) and (415) 943-4076 (outside the United States) On the WWW,
use the URL http://plan9.att.com/index.html/ ."