Plan9FromBellLabs
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Plan 9 is a research OS intended as a successor to Unix, includes the editors sam and ACME.
Author: AT&T Bell Laboratories Homepage: http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/ Papers: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ Wiki: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/ Platform: Various License: Open source
"Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign.
In Plan 9, each process has its own mutable name space. A process may rearrange, add to, and remove from its own name space without affecting the name spaces of unrelated processes. Included in the name space mutations is the ability to mount a connection to a file server speaking [the 9P file protocol]. The connection may be a network connection, a pipe, or any other file descriptor open for reading and writing with a 9P server on the other end. Customized name spaces are used heavily throughout the system, to present new resources (e.g., the window system), to import resources from another machine (e.g., the network stack), or to browse backward in time (e.g., the dump file system)."
The essence of Plan 9 is that all network resources are considered files and mapped off of the user's workstation. The user neither knows nor cares precisely where a program, file, or other resource might be located.
The name derives from the late Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space", widely considered the worst SF film ever made.
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