> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems.
Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo.
HA! This reminded me of the OS class I took in college.
Every professor other than mine taught Linux, but he made us learn Inferno. (One of the best learning experiences of my time there!)
If you're interested in the inner workings of Inferno he literally wrote the, only(?), book on it. There are a couple free excerpts available on his site.[0]
Your professor didn't start doing that at your university. I knew who you were talking about before even visiting your link, although the home directory sealed it: Brian Stuart. Very useful to study (and modify) a small OS.
AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.
It was pretty cool. I did a few capability demos for my team back in 2000 using the IE plugin + Limbo + Tk stuff as a replacement for some really bad Perl configuration tools, but could never get any momentum with it. Wish I (and the plan9/Inferno) people were better salespeople.
> the clean appearance of the screen comes mostly from laziness, but the color scheme is (obviously) deliberate. the intent was to build on an observation by edward tufte that the human system likes nature and nature is full of pale colors, so something you’re going to look at all day might best serve if it were also in relaxing shades. renee french helped me with the specifics of the color scheme (she’s a professional illustrator and my color vision is suspect), once i’d figured out how i wanted it to look. there are still some features of the color system that i put in that i think no one has ever noticed. that’s a good thing, in my opinion; the colors should fade away, if you’ll pardon the expression. having used other systems with different approaches to color screens, most especially windows XP (extra pukey), i think tufte was right.
-rob
rob pike discussing the design of plan9 on the 9fans mailing list back in 2003.
I taught myself Tcl/Tk back in the 90's. It was relatively simple to develop UIs with it. I remember the Tk layout manager was more pleasant than fighting with CSS...
Yep, that is why when modern Web developers talk about responsive design being invented by the Web, it just shows not having a proper background in native toolkits.
While I absolutely LOVE Inferno "philosophically", I agree it doesn't win UI beauty awards... the source is all there and I could probably show my love there by updating things.
Pike, Thompson, Presotto, Collyer, McKie, none of these people contribute to either 9front or 9legacy, beyond providing the original Plan 9 code base which underlies all the forks.
The creators of plan9 are not involved in 9front, and I don't think they were ever involved with 9legacy, unless I've missed something. I believe 9front's (rather colorful) user manual pointedly remarks that the original authors of plan9 have long since abandoned the project.
Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo.
http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/
The forgotten legacy from Plan 9 authors, and influence on Go original design.