Why Plan-9?

[Jim Choate]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> > Being 'first' doesn't imply they were 'alone'. You misrepresent
> > reality to your own end.
> 
> Define your market or relevant niche, with specificity.

Computers intended for single-user interactive processing. When looking at
cost/performance/feature for the OS'es current in the late 60's none were
really effective (I'm excluding Language-in-ROM machines - not that any of
them were stellar in performance). What would one day become engineering
workstations and personal computers (which are the same thing today).

A new class of machines was coming out (my first machine was a PDP 8e
running BASIC) and while there were plenty of tools they tended to be
vertical in intent or else not general purpose enough for this sort of
computing. Look at the first couple of years of Byte or Dr. Dobb's for
more specific examples (remember Godbout?) in the personal computer
market.

Which happens to be one of the primary reasons Unix was developed, there
were no realistic choices in the market for this paradigm. So a solution
can trotting along.

We're facing the same sort of thing today with respect to 'grid computing'
and such. All the current OS'es (Linux incl.) are focused on the old style
of solutions. We'll also find that our current views of what IP means will
be found to be as antiquated.


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