Plan 9 is actually a great OS to play with, and on the surface it looks very much like
UNIX. It follows the original concept of UNIX, which is small, independent, single
purpose modules/files. Modularizing effectively lets you more easily distribute
processes across multiple physical machines seamlessly. Unfortunately, the trend today
in UNIX and Linux is to create all-purpose apps and servers.
Good references are W Richard Steven's UNIX network programming, Plan 9, and QNX,
which I have been using a lot lately, and is remarkably polished for being "beta".
http://www.qnxstart.com is a good site to learn about QNX at (which is now a free
download from http://get.qnx.com. QNX also has some wicked examples of this concept.
I remember hearing about a demo of a QNX cluster, where someone was playing doom in a
window on the screen, and they moved the window half off the display, and sent the
other half of the window to another physical machine and continued playing, seamlessly.
jakob
On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 10:05:55PM -0800, Cory Petkovsek wrote:
> Hmmm, Plan 9 sounds interesting, but Beowulf runs on Linux and FreeBSD. Or the
>Beowulf components and philosophies do.
>
> Plan 9 would be something, though! Bell Labs has some great ideas:
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
> Rather than offering each user a dedicated PC, the mouse/keyboard/monitor provide
>access to the resources to the network. When someone logs in, that terminal
>temporarily becomes 'personalized'. Bell Labs has rethought UNIX.
