AT&T Launches Plan 9 Operating System Murray Hill, NJ, July 19 -- AT&T has announced a new distributed operating system, called Plan 9. The new system was developed by some of the same people who created the Unix operating system, and the terms on which AT&T is making it available are reminiscent of Unix, but the company stressed that Plan 9 is not Unix. Named for the cult science fiction movie Plan 9 From Outer Space, the Plan 9 operating system is designed to work well on networked computers. It has components for "terminals," or desktop systems, for file servers, and for central processing unit (CPU) servers. Plan 9 is designed to deal with multiprocessing systems as CPU servers. It supports four major hardware architectures: Intel Corp.'s x86 line (including the Pentium chip), MIPS Computer Systems Inc. processors, Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARC chips, and Motorola Inc.'s 68020 and 68040 processors. During simultaneous press conferences in Murray Hill and San Francisco, connected by a teleconference link, Rob Pike, one of the Plan 9 developers, said the new system is meant to combine some of the advantages of Unix with some of those of low-cost hardware. "We basically started by noticing some things that we liked and didn't like about Unix and liked and didn't like about workstations," Pike said. Pike stressed that while Plan 9 borrows some ideas from Unix, it is quite different and is not compatible with Unix. He went on to say that AT&T does not expect Plan 9 to compete with major commercial operating systems such as Unix and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT. "This is not the next Unix," Pike said. It appears in fact that the most promising commercial market for Plan 9 might be in embedded systems. During the press conference, AT&T researchers and officials repeatedly mentioned the possibility that Plan 9 might be built into consumer devices and other intelligent electronic devices, an area where no standard operating system predominates today. AT&T plans to make Plan 9 available for commercial licensing to other vendors for an initial fee of $200,000, plus per-copy fees that will amount to 20 percent of the resale price of commercial software or two percent of the selling price of hardware with Plan 9 built in, said Paul Fillinich, marketing manager for AT&T's Software Solutions operation. Single copies of Plan 9 will also be available for research and educational use, but Fillinich stressed that the company will not provide technical support. "We will replace the media should it fail," he said. For commercial licensees there may be some sort of support in the future. "We are contemplating this," Fillinich said. "However, we haven't decided what the offering will be." Publisher Harcourt Brace & Co. will distribute Plan 9 for AT&T. The full package, including a CD-ROM, four diskettes, and two manuals, will cost $350. The manuals are available on their own for $125. Apparently wishing to avoid a repeat of the way Unix splintered into many different versions, AT&T is specifying that while source code for Plan 9 will be made available to research and educational users, any changes they make will become AT&T's property so that they can be incorporated in the base code. "We want only one Plan 9," Fillinich said. "We think the industry wants only one Plan 9." The minimum hardware needed to run Plan 9 is an Intel 386 processor with eight megabytes (MB) of memory and 40MB of available hard disk space, said Phil Winterbottom, another of the Plan 9 developers. An optimal arrangement would include a dedicated file server and multiple desktop terminals, he added. Further information about Plan 9 is available on AT&T's Plan 9 home page on the World Wide Web, at http://plan9.att.com/plan9/index.html. --