Plan 9 From Bell Labs

Intro

Plan 9 (Named after the popular movie Plan 9 From Outer Space) is an operating system offered by Bell Labs from the late 1980's to today. As Bell was the developer of UNIX, their platform for Plan 9 was that it "fixed" many of the issues prevalent in other operating systems at the time. This is true to one extent and a stretch with another: while the OS contained some interesting innovations, it was difficult to use and obfuscated various other functions.

The design principle behind Plan 9 s of a network (distributed) operating system. This is implemented using their 9P communications protocol and whatever component "Name Spaces" are included. The perviously mentioned Name Spaces are an interesting development of Bell: everything in the OS has a name, any definable object. This makes manipulation of objects within a user's namespace very easy. An extension of this is the fascinating "Union Directories" concept, in which all objects across a network are bound in a common directory for the user to access.

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