{"id":1390,"date":"2010-04-09T00:01:57","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T08:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1390"},"modified":"2010-04-03T15:02:41","modified_gmt":"2010-04-03T23:02:41","slug":"plan-9-from-bell-labs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1390","title":{"rendered":"Plan 9 From Bell Labs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nYes, it’s named after one of the worst films of all time, Plan 9 From Outer Space<\/em>. But Plan 9 From Bell Labs isn’t a film, nor is it fiction, nor is it awful. Nope, it’s an operating system that shuns all current operating system paradigms.
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\nBell Labs are the same folks who created the Unix operating system back in the late 1960s\/early 1970s. Unix has been the operating system to admire and ape for computers dating from that time. From text mode to graphics mode, you can find the roots of what you do on a computer today in Unix.<\/p>\n

Heck, you might even be using a Unix operating system to read this post! That is, providing you’re not using Windows.<\/p>\n

Then again, Windows has its roots in DOS, which has many Unix-like features. I always considered DOS to be a Unix wannabe.<\/p>\n

Plan 9 also has Unix-like features, but it’s not Unix. Instead, Plan 9 takes the concept of “everything is a file” and takes it quite literally: In Plan 9, everything<\/em> is a file. From the user to the printer to even processes running on the computer, everything is a file.<\/p>\n

You also won’t find the typical GUI metaphors, such as the desktop, in Plan 9. Here is a Plan 9 screen shot, taken from the Plan 9 web site<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

Plan 9 Screen Shot. Click the image to see more information<\/p><\/div>\n

You can download an ISO version of Plan 9 from the Plan 9 web site. Use the ISO to burn a CD. Use that CD to start your computer, where you can either boot a live version of Plan 9 to play with, or you can install Plan 9 on a bootable partition on your PC’s hard drive.<\/p>\n

Confession: I wasn’t able to get the boot CD to work on my PC. It could be that my PC has more advanced or specific hardware that the Plan 9 boot CD wasn’t able to detect, or I could just be a dweeb. Either way, I wasn’t able to play with Plan 9 this time around.<\/p>\n

I do, however, remember playing with Plan 9 on an older PC. I found it deliciously different. The experience wasn’t frustrating, it was just that without that common desktop-icon-window interface, I was a bit lost as to how the thing worked.<\/p>\n

There is a growing community of Plan 9 adopters. That’s always good news. In fact, had I the time, I’d love to become a part of the Plan 9 community. I think it would remind me of those enjoyable hobbyist days of computing back in the 1980s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, it’s named after one of the worst films of all time, Plan 9 From Outer Space. But Plan 9 From Bell Labs isn’t a film, nor is it fiction, nor is it awful. Nope, it’s an operating system that shuns all current operating system paradigms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1400,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions\/1400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}