Why Plan-9?

Jim Choate ravage at ssz.com
Thu Oct 25 05:52:11 PDT 2001



On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> on Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 09:53:35PM -0500, Jim Choate (ravage at EINSTEIN.ssz.com) wrote:
> > This entire view misses the(!) one most important component of Unix's (and
> > Linux's) success, they were first.
> 
> Not hardly.

Yes, very particularly in fact.
 
> I wasn't keeping notes when K&R were designing their gaming platform,
> but history seems to recall OS/360, Multics, TICO, ITS, VMS.  A bit of
> quick Googling suggests the PDP-7 had its own native operating system
> (the PDP-11 certainly did), certainly more than what a couple of guys
> hanging around a broom closet could hammer out in a few days.

Being 'first' doesn't imply they were 'alone'. You misrepresent reality
to your own end.

What happened is there were a cloud of near-miss OS'es. In the case of
Unix it was the right one becuase of its scale and the mechanism it was
distributed by (it's development process was also out of the ordinary not
being some massive long running committee) and the particular pardigms
that it chose to use. There was a low cost distribution mechanism so
curious people could buy in for a low cost.

The same can be said for Linux, but in that case there were many factors. FSF 
was around and pushing Hurd but they were looking for somebody else to do
it. Minix and other near-miss kernels had been around for a few years so
its not like Linux poped out of thin air. There was no low cost
distribution mechanism that was popular prior to about '94. It's no
accident that Linux took off at the same time that the Internet in general
took off (about '94).

In both cases it was synergy of issues. The license being a key, but not
singular component (as you would have us believe). Another factor of equal
if not greater import was the cost/ease of actual/physical distribution.


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