Your comment made me look up Plan 9 on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs). I like very much the philosophy of Plan 9 and the evolution from the Unix base and it is really a pitty that Plan9 did not have much success. I hope that some of it designs will find its way to Unix though.
I discovered that at least one Plan 9 invention had success and is found today everywhere: UTF 8 encoding.
The OS is under development, and as more people jump in [1], the pace increases. A lot of software has been ported natively or to APE; you can get a pretty decent UNIX workstation with P9 alone those days.
On the other hand, if you want to try it the easy way, consider http://swtch.com/plan9port/ Runs on virtually any POSIX environment, but it's just a teaser of Plan 9. I'm using the Acme editor from it daily.
Linux adapted quite a bit, the clone() syscall, the --bind option for mount (only partly implemented, thou), the pervasive namespacing, the XRender API (modeled after BitBlt) and some more.
In a way Git's storage resembles Venti [2] but probably is just convergent evolution.
It's a funny story; Linux only imported half of the Unicode support from Plan 9. In P9, UTF-8 is used on-the-wire and on-the-storage. However, in case a process wants to deal with sizeable amount of text (say, a text editor, a grep etc.), it converts the UTF-8 into `Runes' -- strings of 32bit integers (till recently 16bit) directly denoting Unicode characters, for fast access by offset. And back to send over wire or write to storage.
Another nice story, you get a network connection with just one libcall: dial().
For example,
int fd = dial("tcp!news.ycombinator.com!http", 0, 0, 0);
For folks looking for a really fast and easy way to play around with Plan 9, I would encourage you to look at 9vx: http://swtch.com/9vx/
No virtual machine, just a tarball (available for freebsd, linux and mac os x) that uses vx32 (http://swtch.com/9vx/) to dynamically execute plan9 code in a sandbox.
I think that's the worst OpenBSD screenshot I've ever seen. Just look at http://www.google.com/images?q=openbsd+screenshot - OpenBSD will happily run pretty much any unix software including WMs. The only real issue is a lack of blobs like nvidia's X driver, and that's not only a disadvantage...
Ah yes, the eternal "transparant terms with half-naked woman or anime background." To be honest I prefer the article's picture to this parody of good aesthetics. It's like I'm running Gentoo in '98 all over again.
I'm 21. I think I actually first used Linux in '99. It was Red Hat 5 IIRC. The Gentoo ricers didn't come till later, but hyperbole has always been my preferred writing style.
They speak about bunch of (seemingly) toy OSes but do not mention Plan 9? It's a well-designed OS that takes the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction to its logical conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Inferno was, in some sense, the successor to Plan 9, as it was developed by the same people using the experience gained from Plan 9 and with similar goals in mind. For example, the protocol underlying the "everything is a file" abstraction in 4th edition Plan 9 is 9P2000; this is basically identical to the Styx protocol found in Inferno, save for the name. It wouldn't surprise me if the author was familiar with Plan 9 but, because of only relatively cursory research, assumed that Inferno had succeeded or obseleted it in some way.
Because one of Java's core unwritten design ideas is "memory is not an issue".
So, if the project is going to be done in unaltered Java then it has to be done on a system with lots of memory.
Wow, I had forgotten about some of those. Nice reminder.
I actually played around with FreeVMS, but I am too young to have ever experienced one in the wild, so after I successfully booted it, I was then stuck. :-/
I have not dabbled with JNode in many, many years, but I find it especially amusing that one of their upcoming release goals is to "use less memory." :-)
No mention of Google or Android in an article about the future of operating systems? It seems to me that a current big shakeup on the OS market is actually being led by Google and that Android represents quite a bit of the future of "alternative" OSs.
That might actually be a compliment to Android's success in the marketplace. The article is about Alternative Operating systems, likely the ones less explored.
IMO, Android isn't generally applicable. The reason Android works is because you have a (fairly) limited set of devices with more or less the same hardware and capabilities (e.g., touchscreen, GPS, radios, gyroscope etc.) So application writers have a fixed number of events they need to access, and a VM + software stack would be able to provide that while making development and security relatively easier.
Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.
> Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware
Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X.
Historically, I think Unix was the first OS to run on multiple different kinds of hardware, as opposed to running on multiple variants of the same architecture.
I had to double check the article publish dates. I don't know who the main audience for this site is but if someone told me these screenshots were of state-of-the-art alternative OSes back in 1999 or earlier, I would have believed it in a second.
Except for OpenBSD, which I suspect they made look as old and frumpy as possible for that article. I'm sure OpenBSD can run about as many attractive window managers as Linux can.
Well, the default X installation really does look that ugly. I don't think anyone doesn't customize it at least a little, though (it's fvwm, which can actually look totally fine if you tweak it a little.)
In any case, two tongue-in-cheek:
``Systems Software Research is Irrelevant'' by Rob Pike http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
``Why Some Dead OSes Still matter'' by Andrey Mirtchovski and Latchesar IonkoV http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/dead_OSes_still_matter/