From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <7ee3623d18f5d40b8d6f90007f008d46@collyer.net> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] So What is P9 good for..... From: Geoff Collyer In-Reply-To: <200302131521.h1DFLpG10205@math.Princeton.EDU> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 18:06:33 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5ea5d7e6-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Just a reminder that CPU and file servers can use any old VGA cards since they only use CGA mode anyway. For personal use, you probably only need one terminal. So limited choices in VGA hardware aren't a great hardship. As for the lack of web browsers and other Applications™, the beauty of distributed computing is that you don't have do everything on one machine with one operating system. Once I get a bug or two related to PCI cards in old Macs fixed in Darwin, I'll be running a web browser on an OS-X Mac and using vnc over a private Ethernet to reach the Mac from my terminal. (Why a Mac? It's the only platform I can find with competent browsers [able to deal with banks' web sites, for example] that don't blow up and take all their windows with them [and usually pretty frequently]. You'd think they could fork a process per window, to provide some insulation against core dumps, but noooooo..... At least Opera remembers which windows you had open, unlike Netscrape and its ilk.) As for why I use Plan 9, it's partly personal preference and partly that Plan 9 is a very elegant and competent system. Reading the early Plan 9 papers, I got the same shiver down my spine as from reading the CACM Unix paper, and in both cases thought `they've really figured it out'. (I was further amazed when I got access to a Unix system to discover that it worked as described, without arbitrary limits or hidden gotchas, in marked contrast to virtually all other operating systems at the time.) Only Tenex ever came close to that, and that was probably in part due to my background working on PDP-10s.