jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) wrote: The Register has published a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from its humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. Along with the ongoing development of 9Front, there is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors (despite being much better than microkernels) never really caught on.
From the article:
Plan 9 was in some ways a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but revisited for the world of networked graphical workstations. It incorporated many of his late 1980s computing fad ideas, both academic theory and the computer industry at the time, and was an exhaustion of two great masters, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students). I reinterpreted them through my own eyes. Perhaps the design geniuses saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misunderstood.
Networking is paramount in Plan 9. There's a good reason why this wasn't the case with Unix. Unix was designed and built at the same time as local area networking was invented. His 4th edition of UNIX, the first version written in C, was released in 1973, the same year as the first version of Ethernet.
Plan 9 puts networking at the center of the design. Although Unix later became the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, such as graphical desktops and shared servers.
Everything is actually a file, so showing a window on another machine is as simple as creating a directory and setting some files there. You can start a program on another computer and view the results on your computer. No X11 or visible networking required at all.
This means all Unixy functionality for telnet, rsh, ssh, X forwarding, etc. is gone. As a result, X11 has become so overcomplicated that Wayland looks like it was invented by Microsoft.
