[9fans] Will I ever use Brazil ?

[forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk]

>>  1) Plan 9 was distributed after it was abandoned. Universities 
>>     had it before development was completely abandoned but I'll 
>>     bet the writing was on the wall.

that comment is misleading: brazil might best be regarded as the further development
of plan 9 within the labs.  plan 9 was therefore not `abandoned' in
the sense that was meant.  (it's also easy to underestimate the painful
effort required to prepare a distribution.)
the more serious problem turned out to be getting anyone outside
(including universities)
interesting in anything that was `different' (ie, not the Unix of their youth).
many people seem happiest ftp'ing things and installing them (especially undertraduates);
thus, it's unattractive to be presented with something that requires
a fair amount of (re)programming.

perhaps there was a hope that universities might pick up the system
and work with it in much the same way as original unix, but that
took place in a world of expensive batch and timesharing systems,
not a world full of CDROMs and software on the net, and even
then it was hard work to argue for unix in many universities.
(``we'll just use industry standard vm/370, gcos, rsx11, vms, etc. off the shelf'')

commercial use of plan 9 was complicated (when i got round to look at it)
by being connected in the first instance to someone in the intellectual
property group of at&t (as it then was), and then by the break up of at&t.
i didn't hadn't got too far into it by then, but it was certainly my first impression that
their model of likely clients was mainly that of manufacturing rather
than services (and their idea of `services' seemed closer to the old
timesharing service model).