[9fans] Six year ANTS-iversary

[mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com]

Tanna: For six years, our ANTS have been upon the Earth, what is their
	status?
Eros: Our Plan 9 plan is succeeding at last.  Numerous Earth
	people have accepted our namespace technologies.
Tanna: Let our efforts be propagated across global grid networks!
Eros: It is already done.  Few may be aware, but our ANTS colony
	spawns have encircled the planet.

Hey 9fans.  As Jim Anchower used to say - been a long time since I
rapped at ya.  Most of the people who are potentially interested in my
Plan 9 software and projects probably already know about them, since I
am active in several other communication channels, but I figured I
should drop a post here, just for the record.

ANTS development has continued for the past six years.  It
transitioned to being primarily 9front based in 2015, and support for
Bell Labs 9 was relegated to a historical-preservation repo at the end
of 2017.  The people with a strong traditionalist bent didn't seem to
be interested anyway.  There has been a live/install iso image for the
past year or so, which brought a lot more users.  I'll be releasing a
new iso image sometime during the next week or so, I think.

In addition to ANTS software, the long dormant public grid project was
resurrected in early 2018 and has been far more successful than the
early attempts in the 2008-10 era.  It has a small but active user
community and has been a nice place for collaborative software
development and testing.  The technical foundations are a bit rickety
and insecure, but we haven't had many issues so far.

The most significant project is the Spawngrid, which came online in
late 2018.  It is a rather ambitious attempt to use ANTS as a platform
for a "competitor" to service platforms like AWS/azure/GCE.  It has a
global network of venti servers which replicate data to each other and
allow multiple independent user environments to be spawned on the
attached cpu servers.  It has also worked surprisingly well, although
it has only a small number of regular users.

Most recently, I have been pursing historical investigation and
recreation of systems based on the hypercubic computers which rose to
prominence in the late 1980s.  Most interesting (to me) are the
systems from nCUBE, which transitioned during the 1990s to a Plan 9
based (!) operating system called Transit which was used for streaming
video appliance servers such as the Mediacube 4.  I am very very
interested in the Transit OS and this history, and I can find almost
no substantive information about the Transit variant of Plan 9,
although information on the earlier generation of nCUBE systems is
fairly plentiful.

Information and links and blog posts and downloads about all this
stuff is spread across the 9gridchan.org ANTS-empire.

Peace and Love to all,
Mycroftiv