[9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[sirjofri via 9fans]

Hi,

sometimes I'm confused about the number of Plan 9 related projects and how they fit into the whole scheme of Plan 9 World. So I started collecting some historic events about various projects and built a little script to convert that into an SVG timeline.

The current state of the timeline can be found here: https://sirjofri.de/oat/tmp/plan9timeline.svg

However, there are many interesting things missing:

- 9atom: I only have the date of the github snapshot, and I'm pretty sure there's more to know
- for most of the projects, I only found some github repos and collected their first and last commit messages. However, git was quite new in the beginning, so most the history that happened before that is missing.
- Some projects list mostly their papers and talks, which don't necessarily reflect their state at that time.
- More recent development is sometimes missing. That includes the latest iwp9 papers/talks.

I'll happily merge patches, if you want to contribute: https://github.com/sirjofri/Plan9History
It's as easy as adding lines to a text file (and provide sources, if possible).

The SVG is somewhat interactive if you use a modern browser (one with js). That means you can click on "links" that will show/hide additional details that are hidden by default to improve the clarity of the graph. The "links" are the blue dotted boxes.

Any feedback, thoughts, ideas are also welcome.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[sirjofri via 9fans]

17.07.2025 22:22:42 ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>:

> This is nice, I'll try to get my changes in

Nice, thank you.

A few notes:

Right now, there is a limitation that we can't add more than one event per year per system. I mean, we can add more, but they will visually overlap, which is not so nice. I don't know if we need that, and I currently have no idea how I would visualize those multiple events.

For some systems, I wasn't really able to find more events than just paper releases. While the papers are important, I think that graph should represent the releases and important dates, not presentations or papers (except maybe in very specific situations). I added those papers anyways just to fill the graph and get a rough idea when that system was active.

I also color-coded the systems to represent their origin (Plan 9, inferno, miscellaneous). If you want to add more systems, you have to adjust the script.awk file and add them.

Patches and ideas for better visualization or better script functionality are also welcome. Also, consider that repo as a very open license, probably MIT (which I'll add asap).

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[sirjofri via 9fans]

Hi,

19.07.2025, 18:11, ron minnich:
> I would say the first real harvey commit was feb 1 2015 or so, those earlier commits were from 0intro's trees. 

I added that, thanks.

> Jehanne forked off a few years after that.

It would be cool to know some more precise year for that graph.

> 
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 9:05 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com <mailto:crossd@gmail.com>> wrote:
>     On Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:53 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com <mailto:rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote:
>         If you can add an entry for HPC, starting in 2000, at LANL, with the setup of the centre, I'll add events after that. Just want to let you put that HPC line where you'd like it.

I wasn't able to find anything about HPC. It would be cool to learn more about it, just to get a rough idea what it's about. Also, I categorized it as a Plan 9 system, if that's correct.

Regarding the lines, there's no "correct" order yet. I think it makes most sense to juggle the lines as they make sense, depending on their space requirements. Besides the history (see updates below) and the plan 9 line, I'd like to keep those at the top. So no need to worry about that when adding new lines. However, ideally, you'd generate the svg and take a look at it (and adjust the order, where needed).

>     And don't forget Brazil!

I know plan 9 has a solid history in Brazil, did they have their own fork? It would be cool to learn more about that.

UPDATES

I added a general history line, with the surrounding events, like what happened with Bell Labs, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent, and so on. I think it makes sense to also capture this and put it into relation with the other (more technical) events. I know every fork (and other projects) have their own history with their own events, but I think adding those would clutter the visuals, and it's worth focusing on the "mainline" of the Plan 9/Inferno history, which is the developers of Plan 9 and Inferno.

I also added dim vertical lines that represent the years. I think it's somewhat easier to navigate when zoomed in this way. The 1px lines are for individual years, the 2px lines for the 5 year marks, and the 3px lines for the decades. The script will automatically draw them as history goes on, so no need to worry about that. If it's too annoying, we can also change that to only mark 5 years and the decades, or otherwise adjust the visuals.

Lastly, in the bottom left corner is the build date and the commit shorthash, mostly for reference. This definitely breaks compatibility with Plan 9, but I didn't care too much about that anyway.

For reference, I'm building the svg on a Windows 11 system using the git bash. I also have a few posix tools installed via cygwin.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 11:20 AM sirjofri via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote:
> [snip]
> >     And don't forget Brazil!
>
> I know plan 9 has a solid history in Brazil, did they have their own fork? It would be cool to learn more about that.

Kinda. As I understood it, Brazil was sort of a mostly-rewrite of Plan
9, after 2e. It was the working name of the system as it was used
internally at Bell Labs, and formed the basis of what became Plan 9
third edition. I believe the name `rio` for the window system is a bit
of a nod here; in 2e it was 8+1/2, after the Fellini film. Brazil was
(AFAIK) named for the Terry Gilliam film, but of course, Rio de
Janeiro is in (the country) Brazil.

Why the rename? I don't really know, but perhaps they felt that the
system had changed sufficiently that it was warranted, particularly in
the graphics subsystems? Maybe it was thought of as a
more-experimentally oriented system, free of backwards compatibility
requirements. Was it a fork? I wouldn't use that terminology to
describe it precisely; more of a follow-on that was then re-merged
into a continuation of the earlier system.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[Steve Simon]

it might be interesting to add coraid’s work to the timeline - their core code is not released but it begat 9atom. i expect Brantly will be happy to supply some major releases.

there was also nCube but i know little if what they did (other than make VOD servers) or anything that might remain from their work.


> On 21 Jul 2025, at 4:19 pm, sirjofri via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 19.07.2025, 18:11, ron minnich:
>> I would say the first real harvey commit was feb 1 2015 or so, those earlier commits were from 0intro's trees. 
> 
> I added that, thanks.
> 
>> Jehanne forked off a few years after that.
> 
> It would be cool to know some more precise year for that graph.
> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 9:05 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com <mailto:crossd@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>    On Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 11:53 AM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com <mailto:rminnich@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>        If you can add an entry for HPC, starting in 2000, at LANL, with the setup of the centre, I'll add events after that. Just want to let you put that HPC line where you'd like it.
> 
> I wasn't able to find anything about HPC. It would be cool to learn more about it, just to get a rough idea what it's about. Also, I categorized it as a Plan 9 system, if that's correct.
> 
> Regarding the lines, there's no "correct" order yet. I think it makes most sense to juggle the lines as they make sense, depending on their space requirements. Besides the history (see updates below) and the plan 9 line, I'd like to keep those at the top. So no need to worry about that when adding new lines. However, ideally, you'd generate the svg and take a look at it (and adjust the order, where needed).
> 
>>    And don't forget Brazil!
> 
> I know plan 9 has a solid history in Brazil, did they have their own fork? It would be cool to learn more about that.
> 
> UPDATES
> 
> I added a general history line, with the surrounding events, like what happened with Bell Labs, Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent, and so on. I think it makes sense to also capture this and put it into relation with the other (more technical) events. I know every fork (and other projects) have their own history with their own events, but I think adding those would clutter the visuals, and it's worth focusing on the "mainline" of the Plan 9/Inferno history, which is the developers of Plan 9 and Inferno.
> 
> I also added dim vertical lines that represent the years. I think it's somewhat easier to navigate when zoomed in this way. The 1px lines are for individual years, the 2px lines for the 5 year marks, and the 3px lines for the decades. The script will automatically draw them as history goes on, so no need to worry about that. If it's too annoying, we can also change that to only mark 5 years and the decades, or otherwise adjust the visuals.
> 
> Lastly, in the bottom left corner is the build date and the commit shorthash, mostly for reference. This definitely breaks compatibility with Plan 9, but I didn't care too much about that anyway.
> 
> For reference, I'm building the svg on a Windows 11 system using the git bash. I also have a few posix tools installed via cygwin.
> 
> sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[David du Colombier]

This is very nice, thanks.

For Plan 9, the Fourth Edition (2002-04-27) is missing.
/n/sources was started on 2002-12-12.

Also, I think you could note that the last change at Bell Labs was done on January 2015.

-- 
David du Colombier

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 History Timeline

[sirjofri via 9fans]

31.07.2025 23:08:24 ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>:
> sorry if I missed this, but how do you want updates? github pull requests, just send you the lines, ... ?

Honestly, I think these updates would integrate quite nicely in any way, so you can choose the way you want. A pull request would be easiest for me, but for people who have no github it could be easiest for them to just send a mail or something.

Ideally, if you know the sources of the data, you can also provide links in the sources file. Though I can imagine that some details only persist in memory.

Thank you for contributing.

sirjofri

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