Plan9? The OS?
That's the one.
Hooooo leeee shit. I have a friend who has been researching Plan9 and Inferno like, non-stop. We've talked a lot about how useful it'd be with a few additions and generally wondered why it didn't catch on? Damn he is going to love this and also hate it xD
God damn this would've seriously changed everything. Plan9 would've been a better internet
Plan 9 was Bell Labs' attempt to make UNIX more UNIX-like than UNIX, in order to replace UNIX. I was at AT&T when the first non-university releases came out, and they really couldn't explain what it was supposed to do that UNIX, GNU/LINUX, or any of the consumer desktop OSes didn't do already. It was just thing magical "thing" that was going to be everywhere in a few years, much like the FireWire ports that showed up on some of the newer (1990s) switching gear. I don't ever remember seeing this in operation anywhere in the Bell System, all of our equipment continued to run UNIX.
The one version I remember trying out worked on a server-client method, and the client didn't work without a connection to a server. I thought that was bullshit, said so, and didn't mess with it again. Would have been fine for an old mainframe infrastructure, but the mid-90s was the age of newly found mobility, and that just didn't work.
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