Re: [9fans] What makes Plan 9 unique?

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:00:24AM +0000, Matt Senecal wrote:
> 
> What makes Plan 9 truly unique? What about it makes it better than Solaris,
> or other UNIX systems?
> 
I've been toying with lib9p over the past week and a lot of what
seemed an extremely handy but very remote paradigm (from the
developer's perspective, as a user I accepted it as a given) suddenly
took on a very concrete mantle.

If that doesn't do it, I also tried remote debugging of a Limbo
program on Inferno with mixed results (not being much of a debugger
freak).  The equivalent operation with acid over a network ought to
impress developers.  Even if done in two distinct rio windows.

> Imagine you're going to be giving the presentation to a bunch of long-time
> computer users whose main attitude going into the meeting is going to be:
> "Nice lines, but so what? Why should I consider Plan 9?"
> 
I wouldn't try that approach.  Perhaps "what can I learn from Plan 9?"
I was thrilled when I read the very old papers, without a clue about
the system itself.

> I understand that I'm going to be learning a lot of this on my own in the
> coming weeks, but I wanted to make sure that there wasn't some cool feature
> that I missed. There's only so much you can learn on a standalone system
> (although I may be networking with an old donated '486 if I can find some
> NICs).

Most of my Plan 9 network is '486s with NE2000s.  Not great, but
workable.  And very stable.  I was getting fileserver freezes which
were resolved (I don't know why) when I took the SCSI disk out and
reconnected all its cabling.  In all other respects, it seems totally
maintenance free.  Note that this is a hybrid of Second and Third
edition Plan 9, not yet up to date as regards releases.

++L