From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 09:00:52 +0000
From: Guan Yang guanix@softhome.net
Subject: [9fans] [huge joke] History....
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 992ccc42-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19990626090052.9nwFhRyfRnIXYEcMHRsFNu7tMWzNJNhpfrDoKD74fkc@z>

Hmmm... So Dennis and Ken and various other cool guys in New Jersey have
come up with another operating system! Let's take a look at that...
[browsing the web]

Wow! It costs $350! But then you get two books and a map of the entire
US. Sounds like AT&T (oh, sorry, Lucent Technologies) hasn't changed a
lot in the last 30 years.

But I don't have $350 (seriously, I don't). Wait a minute, there's a
4-diskette system that you can install on a PC. Think, think... A
complete OS with windowing system, tools, compilers, on four diskettes.
This definitely doesn't come from MIT. Still impressed you can do it,
though.

Download, install (lots of problems with DOS FDISK and DOS FORMAT that
doesn't want to soft-format drivers; end up using a linux bootdisk),
groove. This is great! Okay, I don't have three buttons on my mouse, so
nothing works, and Sam is a bit weird (haven't those New Jersey guys
begun using another editor than ed???), but overall a nice system.

[navigating around the filesystem] Where are the sources?!! Oh, they're
probably on that huge book that costs $350. But the contents of those
books are available on the Internet. Why don't I do my own clone? I
could even go to Berkeley to do it (I'm due for college selection in a
couple of years)! At least by that time I would be mature enough to have
a clue about that insane hardware they call the PC. [Note: I am reading
_Linux Device Drivers_, and I must say that if I were to make an
operating system, it would _not_ run on the PC. M68k (NuBus) or Sparc
seem like friendly architectures.]

Then I could call this new operating system of my own design BSD Plan 9!
But BSD Plan 9 is based on New Jersey sources, so I begin forking the
source tree, and getting rid of those New Jersey sources, so people
don't have to pay $350 for the software anymore. Let's call it -
386BSDPlan9! What a marvelous idea...

But its hard to get patches merged into 386BSDPlan9, so why don't we
(for the sake of history) have another fork? Yeah, some random hackers
begin work on ... FryBSDPlan9, PetBSDPlan9 and ClosedBSDPlan9!

Wait, wait, before 386BSDPlan9 begins, we need a hacker in Helsinki to
begin work on some kind of system called ... hmmm ... let's call it
Unknownix. This guy couldn't afford the $350 set either, so he just
bought the $150 set with the books only. And so Unknownix came to be a
lot bigger than 386BSDPlan9, but also with more features, and less
compatible.

And Unknownix begins rolling, and more and more people begin hacking on
it, until Slickware Unknownix, Green Hat Unknownix, Calderoun Unknownix
and all the other "Unknownix Distributions" begin winning the admiration
of the corporate world and the non-hackers.

Just a bit before this, Dennis and Ken and the other guys begin working
on their next project, Plan 10....

--
The nice thing about Windows is - It does not just crash, it displays
a dialog box and lets you press 'OK' first.

Read this at www.geekcode.com
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d- s-:+ a---- C++ UL++ P+ L++ E- W++ N o K- w--- O M- V-- PS+ PE+ Y+
PGP+ t+ 5- X++ R+ tv b+++ DI+ D+ G e-- h! !r !z
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------