![\"Plan9bunnysmblack\"](\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/Plan9bunnysmblack.jpg\")
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Several years ago, I wrote about Plan 9<\/a>, the operating system designed by Bell Labs to succeed Unix. Just as it happened in the movie<\/a>, Plan 9 isn’t going to succeed. The other day I was thinking about computer operating systems and how everything today is pretty much stuck on the “desktop” metaphor. In fact, the “desktop” isn’t really a desktop at all; it’s simply a graphical interface. Any semblance to a physical desktop is gone, though in the early days some of the first graphical operating systems used more of the desktop metaphor on the screen.<\/p>\n Plan 9 was one of many attempts to create a new operating system that broke away from the old desktop. When I looked at the Plan 9 site, I found that the last “new” version of the operating system was introduced back in 2002. That makes Plan 9 pretty much vetusware as far as modern computers are concerned.<\/p>\n Of the many reasons Plan 9 failed, the biggest is a lack of end user software. You can’t get users to adopt a new OS unless they’re supplied with a ton of software.<\/p>\n When IBM introduced OS\/2 to replace DOS, it lacked software. OS\/2 was a great OS and had lots of power. But people ran DOS programs, so the few who actually used OS\/2 simply ran the DOS shell and that was it.<\/p>\n Microsoft really pushed Windows hard back in the 1980s and early 1990s. They took a gamble when they converted Word and Excel to run only on Windows. In fact, I’m sure that WordPerfect and Lotus were eager to soak up the user base, but Microsoft’s persistence won the day. It wasn’t easy.<\/p>\n Mac users had no choice to adopt OS X as it came on all new Macintoshes. That’s an advantage of owning both the operating system and the hardware company.<\/p>\n I don’t think anyone is looking for a new OS. The great pushback to the “Get Windows 10” program demonstrates that users are content with their current PC configuration. Even a minority of Mac users don’t update to the latest version of OS X when it comes out. Without motivation to change the universal OS paradigm, change isn’t going to happen.<\/p>\n In the bigger picture, we’re stuck with the current desktop\/filesystem metaphor. Better ways to use a computer most likely exist, but I doubt that they’ll leave the labs where they’ve developed. That’s sad, because had Plan 9 succeeded, it could have really shaken up the desktop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Desktop computer technology needs a shakeup, but probably won’t ever get one.<\/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-8403","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\/8403","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=8403"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8405,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8403\/revisions\/8405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThat’s too bad, because I admired what Plan 9 was trying to do: To add some sense to the original notion of Unix, which is that everything in the computer is a file.<\/p>\n