From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:59:40 -0600 From: "Ronald G. Minnich" To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] alright, this should be interesting In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Topicbox-Message-UUID: f1df4176-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 well, all I know is that when I moved to Unix from other OSes in 1976 (I'm old) it was a revelation from heaven. It had a major impact on how my brain worked. Things that were just plain not doable on other OSes were trivial on Unix. It really did change my thought processes. Going to other OSes (OS/MVS, HP MPE, RT/11, RTE, IBM's OSes for the Series/1 machine, RSX, etc.) I would start to feel a visceral anger at them. You want to know about gesture computing? You should see the gestures I used at those OSes. I used to get so angry at HP MPE that occasionaly I'd hit the return key a little hard and it would fly out of the cube. I got good at repairing keyboards. So to me, the OS is a Big Deal. The model the OS presents to me molds my thought processes in some sense -- I guess I'm weak-minded! Same for me with Plan 9. I keep going back to Linux and getting angry at it. It's really a total pain for me to use it now that I've gotten used to Plan 9. Keyboards are sturdier than the ones I used to have, and I'm older and weaker, so no big problems yet, however. Although I do keep a hunk of railroad rail under my desk for non-cooperative hardware ... interesting to see what a railroad rail will do to an IBM Deskstar. ron