Do you have a source for that? Bell Labs Unix had version 9 in 1986 and version ...

smorrow · on Dec 30, 2019

Earliest reference to Plan 9 is 1984: http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/unix-before-berkeley/

LukeShu · on Jan 2, 2020

That 1984 year doesn't seem to be entirely accurate; at a minimum, the article has had additions since 1984 (including the 1998 death of John Lions).

The abstract notes that it was published in DaemonNews in 1999.

I tracked down the DaemonNews publication: https://web.archive.org/web/20000819035036/http://www.daemon...

The copy in DaemonNews includes citations that were elided from the copies on cat-v.org and darwinsys.com. Notably, we see that line change from

> (More recently, much of this work has been consolidated into an operating system called Plan 9 From Bell Laboratories.)

to

> (More recently, much of this work has been consolidated into an operating system called Plan 9 From Bell Laboratories.)[Pike1990a, Pike1995a]

emmelaich · on Dec 28, 2019

Unfortunately no. I may be wrong.

However I think plan9 started as a skunkworks project well before Unix v9 was released.

[edit - wikipedia maybe supports me ]

> Plan 9 from Bell Labs was originally developed, starting in the mid-1980s,

LukeShu · on Dec 28, 2019

All of the authoritative sources I've found say that it was started in the "late" 1980s, not "mid" 1980s.

For instance:

> Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s.

https://9p.io/plan9/about.html

The Wikipedia's citation on the sentence saying "mid-1980s" is the press release for the 2nd edition of Plan 9 (1995, the first generally available version), which doesn't mention anything of the sort. That is to say: Wikipedia's "mid-1980s" claim isn't well-attributed.

(The 1st edition of Plan 9 (1992) wasn't generally available, and was only made available to universities.)

(My above 1987 citation states that they worked on it in 1987 and implies, but does not explicitly state, that there was no work before that.)