[9fans] Reasons Plan 9 Keeps Catching On

[9fans] Reasons Plan 9 Keeps Catching On

[kim kubik]

Back in about 1983 when I first ran across this thing
called Unix (on a Z8000 machine) and flipped over what
I
saw (a pipe sequence), I tried to find out everything
I
could about the system.

There was ONE BOOK, the Thomas and Yates one, and
it really didn't tell much. Later I was able to
special
order SR Bourne's book and made up some story to
get our corporate library to obtain a copy of the
1978 issue of the BSTJ. But that was later. Initially
it was just that one book (and the author's screaming
about how this Unix was going to rule, dude . . .
this was also the era when I saw an engineer
holding a large cookie sheet size board and exclaiming
incredulously, "*THIS* IS A MEGABYTE OF RAM!").

But that was it . . . that was all that was available
about this system called Unix. I had a dialup
connection
to that Z8000 system and the guy would sometimes send
me copies of some of the papers laying around the CS
room
at Berkeley, the commands vi recognized, how to use
tip.

So figure Plan 9 is about where Unix was in 1983. I
remember
around that time reading a magazine article that
showed a short
shell script and phoned the guy in Berkeley and said,
"What's
This Thing!?!"

There literally was nothing in print that even
mentioned a
shell script! Unix was word-of-mouth, you had to be
_near_
a sysadmin to learn the secrets. It was like being
initiated
into a secret society and I was on the wrong side of
the Bay.

Now go to Stacy's and count the books on Unix, Linux,
vi,
Shells, awk, sed, etc, etc. Hell, even include emacs
books.
I just got a contract job at a large company and
everyone
has a desktop NT machine, but their "world" isn't on
the
C:\ drive, it is down the wire somewhere, so you can
be
"terminated" easily. As far as the user knows, there
is no
local disk.

But in 1983, just after IBM introduced this little
8088
system, Unix was a flop.(how many people do you know
that
bought one of those 'canoe paddle' UNIX PC's from AT&T
at
FULL PRICE?). One reason was because of the "personal"
in
"Personal Computer" - that is, it was affordable by a
person.
Unix was not, it required a committee.

But now Unix (Linux) has reached that point,it is no
longer
a flop, it is affordable by a person, so is now a
"personal
computer" OS. But it carries a lot of baggage from its
multiuser days. And I won't even begin ranting about
X11.

And if I see any "problem" with Plan 9, it is that
same need
for a 'more than one' person decision making. Sure you
can get
it and install as all-in-one, but that isn't utilizing
the best
ideas. Still, these things start with one person,
showing it to
another, and so on. Maybe an incremental approach
would help; you
begin with the single machine, then keep the desktop
terminal
server and cpu server, but add a file server (and in
this day
and age a Win32 machine with most of the disk
partitioned to P9
would make a lot of sense - there still is just too
many reason
for need of Win32 and tho I HATE dual boots, what if
you could
boot into Win32, but just have it sit there most of
the time
honoring the p9 file requests, and when you actually
needed say
MS Word because your boss wants a Word doc, you just
open Word,
write the dammed thing (P9 is frozen at this point),
send it off,
and then go back to P9. (I also don't even want to get
into my
experiences with desktop Linux except to say that Bill
Gates
has nothing to worry about there . . .).

And since I'm babbling, somewhere back in this
newsgroup someone
mentioned newer UI's and said like, "Just look on
Freshmeat".

Well, I look on Freshmeat a lot and most of the "new"
UI's (ie,
window systems) have one thing in common: they tell
how they are
based on 9wm. Hell, look at 'larswm' - it is both 9wm
plus the
acme screen management ideas "ported" to xterms! Want
to take a
minor example of say, blind people and the "world"? I
saw
a blind guy at an intersection where the city had
jackhammered
up the curb in order to install wheelchair ramps for a
different
kind of handicapped person. But the city workers
didn't
finish in one day (surprise, surprise), so put yellow
plastic
tape around the pile of concrete rubble and then
covered that rubble
with this bright orange plastic mesh.

This blind guy had his cane caught in the mess. I'd
never seen the
stuff before and I KNOW he had never seen it. Someone
helped him out,
but the idea is, you can't cover all the bases. You do
the best you
can a the low level and if it is done properly, then
it can support
whatever is necessary for the users at the "extremes".
Otherwise, you
build a system like the Kurt Vonnegut short story in
which "equality"
was taken to its logical extreme: in the story, the
more talented a
ballet dancer was, the more attached weights and
constraints were
added to that person so that everyone was "equal" in
the stage production.

Sure, there are things I'd like to see, but I'm just
one person. I used
a system that kept a scrollable window of the command
history. You could
double click to re-execute one, or single click to put
it down in the editable
execution line. Or delete a command. And the command
did not have to be sent
to any one one of the open shell windows; it was just
text, it could go to
any window, an editor, a comm pgm. I think that would
be a nice feature for
acme. And in the equivalent of plumber was a full
language, with two way
communication between each program and the 'plumber'
box was like one of those
old diagrams of a STAR network topology. Every program
put up its message
port name and could receive input from the keyboard
and mouse via the "front
door" OR could receive input (optionally modified by
the language in the
plumb box to fit what the pgm expected) via the "back
door" of its message
port.

This computer "game" is far from over. These things
are communications
devices and the mere fact that P9 is built from day
one with that in
mind implies to me that it is 1983 and someone just
said "Unix? What's a
Unix?".

[9fans] Reasons Plan 9 Keeps Catching On

[A. Baker]

Who was that masked man???
:-)
------------8<------------

Message: 6
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:58:39 GMT
From: kim kubik <chaotrope@jps.net>
Organization: EarthLink Inc. --
http://www.EarthLink.net
Subject: [9fans] Reasons Plan 9 Keeps Catching On
Reply-To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu

Back in about 1983 when I first ran across this thing
called Unix (on a Z8000 machine) and flipped over what
I
saw (a pipe sequence), I tried to find out everything
I
could about the system...
------------8<------------
(I also don't even want to get
into my
experiences with desktop Linux except to say that Bill
Gates
has nothing to worry about there . . .).



=====
Boojum

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