From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: John Stalker <stalker@maths.tcd.ie>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 for a newbie 
In-reply-to: <45F072F9.10903@watford53.freeserve.co.uk> 
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Date: Fri,  9 Mar 2007 10:33:07 +0000
Message-ID: <200703091033.aa02874@salmon.maths.tcd.ie>
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I will probably get flamed for writing this, but I will go ahead anyway.
It's not accidental that early public versions of UNIX were Programmers'
Workbench and Document Writers' Workbench.  UNIX then and plan9 now are
really optimised for those two uses.  Acme(1), for example is wonderful
for either set of users.  Acid(1) is very appropriately named, in terms
of how much it can expand a programmer's perception of reality.  If you
aren't writing code or documentation though then you are basically left
with a cute bunny and not much else.  Note that this is not a gripe,
simply an observation.

> O.K., I've got Plan 9 running as a guest on XP using Qemu. Seems to run 
> fine and is not unusably slow. I'm at the stage of:
> 
> "Hmm, not sure what's going on here - it's all pretty different to Linux 
> (which I'm quite familiar with). I'm sure there must be interesting 
> things to find out, but I don't really know where to start"
> 
> I need some guidance to take me to:
> 
> "Gosh, I quite like this way of doing things, let's find out more!"
> 
> and hopefully to:
> 
> "Wow, this is mind blowing - why don't all O.S.es do it this way?"
> 
> Can anyone suggest things that I might try to give me a sense of what 
> Plan 9 is all about, please?
> 
> Jim Ford
-- 
John Stalker
School of Mathematics
Trinity College Dublin
tel +353 1 896 1983
fax +353 1 896 2282