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Plan 9 From Bell Labs (Real)Unix++
Date: 2005/10/09 Agree? Disagree? : Have Your Say Buy Books About This Topic At: Amazon UK Amazon US Send This Article To A Friend: Email It Use Telepathy In the late 1980's, researchers at AT&T's Bell Labs began work on a new operating system, one that would fix everything they thought was wrong with UNIX, which they had developed years earlier. They wanted windowing by default, unlike UNIX, which had X11 (an oft-derided windowing system) added to it years later. They wanted to be able to do neat things with the filesystem, and they wanted to reduce the complexity of the entire system. They also wanted to name the resulting system after the movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," generally acknowledged as one of the worst movies in history. This move seems to have little reason other than that the name "Plan 9" does sound pretty cool. These intrepid hackers started by taking the UNIX premise of "everything is a file" (which wasn't ALWAYS true, or was only partly true (like so many Guide articles)) to a whole new level. Everything, including network connections, has a file name associated with it in Plan 9. They also used the UNIX philosophy of having small programs that do one thing well; indeed, they took it so far that many programs are missing what seems like vital features, although there are usually alternatives. The developers decided that since the Teletype was long dead, there was no reason to have a text-only interface. Terminal-type windows were retained as an efficient way to interact with the system (although tab completion, a favorite feature of most UNIX users, was left out in favor of copying and pasting directory paths from previous "ls" commands, leaving one wondering if that really is the simpler way), but except for a compatibility program called "vt," the terminal emulator disappeared from Plan 9. Unlike many UNIX or Windows systems, Plan 9 usually splits jobs among several machines. There is most often a CPU server and a file server, although the very cheap administrator can opt to use just one machine for CPU and files. The CPU server has a fast processor and little or no hard drive space; instead, it boots from the file server, a slower machine with plenty of storage. Individual terminals then boot from the file server. Each terminal runs its own programs, unless extra computation is needed, in which case the user connects to the CPU server and runs his programs there. To make such things possible, elements of a user's filesystem can be exported from one machine to another; files on a German Plan 9 system can be made to seem local. FTP and some other protocols are accessed in a similar way--a user runs "ftpfs <servername>", is prompted for a username and password, and can then see the files on the FTP server as though they were in a directory on his hard drive. Although it contains many novel concepts and provides an environment in which complex things can be done through simple scripts, Plan 9 has yet to be widely adopted; this could be because of the unwillingness of UNIX users to give up their OS, or due to the arrogance of Plan 9 developers and users (scaring away newbies), or both. There are Plan 9 installations which provide free accounts to those who would like to give it a try; http://9grid.de, http://texas.9grid.us, and http://www.tip9ug.jp all have accounts available for the asking. See also |
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