5.7.  The past: UNIX

Rob Pike:

• UNIX has had trouble adapting to ideas born after it.

• Graphics and networking were poorly added to UNIX.

• UNIX was designed for private machines.

• Plan 9 began in the late 1980's as an attempt to have it both ways:

• to build a system that was centrally administered and
  
• cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements.

• The problems with UNIX were too deep to fix, but some of its ideas could be brought along.

From: Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Rob Pike, et all.

Brian W. Kernighan:

Plan 9 is not UNIX. If you think of it as UNIX, you'll often be frustrated because something doesn't exist or works differently. If you think of it as Plan 9, however, you'll find that most of it works very smoothly, and that there are some truly neat ideas that make things much cleaner than you have seen before.

Plan 9 was developed at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies', Computer Science Research.

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