My route here was: when my ISP said I'd have to buy W95, because Win3 wasn't good enough any more, I said screw-you and found linux and ETHO [the single fd0, full OS & inet suite].
After using ETHO for some years, all other OSs felt like tying your shoe- laces wearing boxing-gloves. When ETHO was ported to linux, the ability to access the *nix & FAT FSs plus the superior *nix inet facilities and *.pdf & *.doc viewers allowed use of ETHO's superior text editing facilities, with the ability to eg. see *.pdf on the same screen. What can you do when documents which should be published in plain text are in *pdf & *.doc ?! Because ETHO's VNC is too clunky and <running *nix jobs via ETHO, by cycling through clipboard-files is tedious> I found acme->plan9->wily, which had ETHO's superior mouse-based editor [near copy] and could run *nix commands directly. Since plan9 had admitted to copying ETHO, I knew it was GOOD STUFF. ---------------- I've long realised that the naive/wrong view of computing is app-centered, eg. the monster-browser, that does-every-thing. Whereas the correct/ extendable view is data-centered. Which implies file-directory-centered. I used to think of *MY* file heirarchy; but plan9 is 'higher'/better in viewing the global data-heirarchy. [OTOH relying on clouds will bring more disaster than the recent global economic collapse, and what about google enslaving humanity: can YOU survive without google?] The other powerfull notion [apart from data/file centered] which allows openess/extention is <menus>, which facilitiate the capture and access of knowledge of what-we've-already-learned-and-paid-for, is used in ETHO. I suspect that Wirth got all these ideas from his time at PARC? They aren't spelled out, but with long usage, you can read-between the lines. OTOH, I appreciate the writings of the originators of *nix, who've apparently gone on to create plan9, who explicitly spell out the underlying <principles of the *nix way of doing it>. Recently I've tested the RaspberyPi hardware and was very impressed. Is it realistic to use the Rpi as a stepping stone to plan9? If so, how should I proceed [my main activity is collecting text from the inet, to read and merge/manipulate and store, for later reference]? == TIA.
