[TUHS] Re: forgotten versions

[Jacob Moody <moody@posixcafe.org>]

On 6/19/22 12:38, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 2:33 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 10:47:23AM -0400, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>>> Just chiming in a bit..
>>>
>>> Rob, it might be interesting to old geezers like me as well as newbies
>>> entering the field to get a perspective on Plan 9 and its evolution. The
>>> motivations behind it. What your group was trying to accomplish,  the
>>> approach, pitfalls and the entire decision making process as things went
>>> along. Even things that went horribly wrong and what happened etc.
>>
>> I'll second that.  I think it would be really helpful.
>>
>> There was a time when I was reviewing a paper which made a bunch of
>> claims about what Plan 9 was trying to accomplish and in particular
>> about what the ultimate design goals for a particular component of
>> Plan 9.  (I won't go into further details since as far as I know, that
>> paper was never published.)
>>
>> In any case, since I wasn't familiar with the history of Plan 9 to
>> evaluate these claims, with the permission of the PC chairs, I found
>> someone who had been part of the Plan 9 team, and asked them to review
>> certain passages for accuracy, and they said, "Uh, no.... that's
>> totally not the case.  They're completely wrong."
>>
>> So if someone were willing to create additional write ups about
>> lessons learned, or if that's too much work, maybe someone could do
>> some interview for a podcast or a vlog, that would be really
>> excellent.
> 
> Agreed. A retrospective would be a very welcome addition to the canon.
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 
> (PS: I _had_ heard of the VAX effort before, but I don't think I'd known
> quite how nascent it was before it was abandoned in favor of MIPS and
> 68k.)

Adding my vote in for getting some sort of retrospective.

I recently stumbled across the existence of datakit
when going through the plan9foundation source archives.
Would be curious to hear more about its involvement
with plan9.