I've been reading about Plan 9 lately but I am still missing why exactly (or more-or-less) Plan 9 (and Research Unix, similarly) fell out? From what I've read it seems like the lack of ubiquity forced the Plan 9 guys out of Plan 9 and back into Ubuntu or OpenBSD. From their discussions of rc, etc it seemed like the lack of users caused them to move away from it until it just completely fell apart... But I'm not sure?
And where is Plan 9 now? If I want to get involved should I look into 9front? Inferno? Or this guys github mirror [0] because the Plan 9 website is down?
I understand these are some smart guys, but the cat-v website makes a ton of divisive statements and "leaves it as an exercise to the reader" to figure out why they hold these views. The trolling isn't awful, but in general, I'm having a really tough time fighting my way into the Plan 9 circle.
How have you dealt with this? Aside from my initial (more historical) question, any suggestions for getting started? Is it even worth getting familiar with Plan 9 or rc or acme or sam or the plethora of ported tools? Or should I just wait until Russ Cox and Rob Pike come up with a production-ready OS?
No disrespect meant, just have a lot of questions.
Plan 9 didn't catch on for a lot of reasons -- bad licensing, bad marketing, being too different from unix which was "good enough", etc. The fact that your average nix sysadmin, who can manage pretty well between BSDs, Linux, AIX, HPUX, etc, would be utterly puzzled when given the task of managing a plan 9 system, probably discouraged a lot of businesses from adopting it.
If you are not married to your current editor of choice, give Acme a try -- it's quite different, but I've been using it as my primary for about 5 years (I write mostly write C, Bash, Python, Go, Puppet. Hesitant to use it for more editor-dependent languages like Java and C#), and I've been very happy with it. It's available for Linux, BSD, and OS X as part of plan9port. For me, secret to being productive in Acme was learning to write my own plumbing rules, which let you turn plain text into hyperlinks based on pattern matching.
Plan 9 does not have to be a purely historical endeavor; If you manage to write a 9P file server, you can actually mount it on other OSes, either through the native 9P support in the Linux kernel, or through a wrapper program like 9pfuse. For example, I recently saw a 9P file server that turned jira into a file tree of tickets that you could edit with a text editor.
http://9front.org/ is the most actively developed fork, and is the most likely to work on your hardware. They don't take themselves seriously, though, and are perfectly fine with being niche, so they don't put much effort into being welcoming to people who don't do their reading.
I think at least part of the problem was the hardware required to run a more complete installation where you'd start to see the benefits of the approach. As the paper outlines, a Plan 9 network needed at least a CPU server, file server and one or more terminals, plus possibly an authentication server (the CPU server might have been able to do this too). I seem to remember that the installation instructions assumed you'd have this kind of hardware available too, so getting a working system was quite an investment.
The file server was somewhat specialised too: the Plan 9 one used an optical WORM jukebox to provide its long-term storage. If you didn't have one of those you could simulate it with disk storage, but there's a cost trade off there.
Without this investment in hardware it was like trying to understand how NFS or web infrastructure works with only a single machine to work with.
In some ways it's similar to the obstacles that hobbyists face investigating the Hadoop ecosystem today: the hardware required to build a realistic installation on which to experiment is quite costly. With Hadoop you can use virtual machines and/or cloud hosting to try things out. When Plan 9 came out you didn't have that option so you needed to assemble physical hardware yourself.
>From what I've read it seems like the lack of ubiquity forced the Plan 9 guys out of Plan 9 and back into Ubuntu or OpenBSD
That's… interestingly ahistorical. No one was force back from plan 9 to ubuntu or openbsd because when plan 9 "lost" neither existed. Plan 9's window of opportunity existed in the early '90s when linux and the web weren't firmly established.
Unfortunately Plan 9 wasn't released with a proper license until 2002, at that point Linux had already won the war (for half a decade), the problems that plan 9 solved had been solved in other ways (perhaps less elegantly) by the rest of the world, plan 9 lagged behind on a number of important areas and bell labs were being downsized significantly.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. I think that's because there were two mentions of Plan 9 in one day. Otherwise, we only see it every few days or so.
this paper still reads revolutionary now, but imagine how it felt to read it in 1993 and compare it with your average "system" either at home or at work.
windows for workgroups was released the same year, while we were struggling to set up IPX networks to play doom between two machines at home...
The early 90s had a lot of interesting OS theory work going on. Andrew S Tanenbaum, of Minix fame, was working on Amoeba at the same time, which also was designed to present network transparency to the end user. Sprite was another, which also offered things like seamless process migration.
But, it all stopped. Research budgets dried up, the computer got bigger than any one OS team could handle, and some OS out of Finland came in and scooped up all the mindshare. Since then, we've been stumbling in the dark, using scant shards of the tools they made, like python, with overall systems not much better than what they have. Lispers talk of the AI Winter, but the ongoing OS Winter is far, far worse in terms of the absolute stagnation of an entire force of society. We really do deserve better than what we have now.
Anyone that likes Plan 9 should also look at Amoeba [1] and Globe [2]. Amoeba did a lot of interesting work that could be considered when doing a modern, Plan9-like effort. Globe did for WAN's what Amoeba tried to do for LAN's. I had hoped solutions like Globe would get more traction given Globe applications would be way better than upcoming Web applications. Globe team even proved it by doing Web on top of their own stuff: doing Web better than Web lol. Unfortunately, the mainstream led us down a path resulting in trying to accelerate Web applications powered by protocols from time-sharing days on monolithic UNIX and Windows OS's. A little less fun...
Amoeba indeed had cool ideas, like most things A.S. Tanenbaum has worked on, but I always thought Sprite was more novel.
I haven't looked into Amoeba too deeply, I must admit, but other than its support for network transparency and single system imaging from heterogenous machines, I don't think it's very Plan 9-ish at all.
[+] [-] eatonphil|10 years ago|reply
And where is Plan 9 now? If I want to get involved should I look into 9front? Inferno? Or this guys github mirror [0] because the Plan 9 website is down?
I understand these are some smart guys, but the cat-v website makes a ton of divisive statements and "leaves it as an exercise to the reader" to figure out why they hold these views. The trolling isn't awful, but in general, I'm having a really tough time fighting my way into the Plan 9 circle.
How have you dealt with this? Aside from my initial (more historical) question, any suggestions for getting started? Is it even worth getting familiar with Plan 9 or rc or acme or sam or the plethora of ported tools? Or should I just wait until Russ Cox and Rob Pike come up with a production-ready OS?
No disrespect meant, just have a lot of questions.
[0] - https://github.com/0intro/plan9
[+] [-] sleepydog|10 years ago|reply
If you are not married to your current editor of choice, give Acme a try -- it's quite different, but I've been using it as my primary for about 5 years (I write mostly write C, Bash, Python, Go, Puppet. Hesitant to use it for more editor-dependent languages like Java and C#), and I've been very happy with it. It's available for Linux, BSD, and OS X as part of plan9port. For me, secret to being productive in Acme was learning to write my own plumbing rules, which let you turn plain text into hyperlinks based on pattern matching.
Plan 9 does not have to be a purely historical endeavor; If you manage to write a 9P file server, you can actually mount it on other OSes, either through the native 9P support in the Linux kernel, or through a wrapper program like 9pfuse. For example, I recently saw a 9P file server that turned jira into a file tree of tickets that you could edit with a text editor.
[+] [-] ori_b|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhw|10 years ago|reply
The file server was somewhat specialised too: the Plan 9 one used an optical WORM jukebox to provide its long-term storage. If you didn't have one of those you could simulate it with disk storage, but there's a cost trade off there.
Without this investment in hardware it was like trying to understand how NFS or web infrastructure works with only a single machine to work with.
In some ways it's similar to the obstacles that hobbyists face investigating the Hadoop ecosystem today: the hardware required to build a realistic installation on which to experiment is quite costly. With Hadoop you can use virtual machines and/or cloud hosting to try things out. When Plan 9 came out you didn't have that option so you needed to assemble physical hardware yourself.
[+] [-] EdiX|10 years ago|reply
That's… interestingly ahistorical. No one was force back from plan 9 to ubuntu or openbsd because when plan 9 "lost" neither existed. Plan 9's window of opportunity existed in the early '90s when linux and the web weren't firmly established.
Unfortunately Plan 9 wasn't released with a proper license until 2002, at that point Linux had already won the war (for half a decade), the problems that plan 9 solved had been solved in other ways (perhaps less elegantly) by the rest of the world, plan 9 lagged behind on a number of important areas and bell labs were being downsized significantly.
[+] [-] jlarocco|10 years ago|reply
Sigh. Really?
[+] [-] thisrod|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f2f|10 years ago|reply
windows for workgroups was released the same year, while we were struggling to set up IPX networks to play doom between two machines at home...
[+] [-] Sanddancer|10 years ago|reply
But, it all stopped. Research budgets dried up, the computer got bigger than any one OS team could handle, and some OS out of Finland came in and scooped up all the mindshare. Since then, we've been stumbling in the dark, using scant shards of the tools they made, like python, with overall systems not much better than what they have. Lispers talk of the AI Winter, but the ongoing OS Winter is far, far worse in terms of the absolute stagnation of an entire force of society. We really do deserve better than what we have now.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html
[2] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~philip/globe/
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
I haven't looked into Amoeba too deeply, I must admit, but other than its support for network transparency and single system imaging from heterogenous machines, I don't think it's very Plan 9-ish at all.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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