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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Those two (and a few more) good things about it that solved real problems were adopted.

Most others, including its central premise about everything actually being a file, were not (adopted or successful), and turned out they weren't a big deal.

If from one product with 1 central premise and 10 new features the world only adopts 2 of those features, I'd still call it a "total failure" market-and-adoption wise, and a waste of time for those building it.

They could have built those 2 features independently anyway.

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> Most others, including its central premise about everything actually being a file, were not (adopted or successful), and turned out they weren't a big deal.

Except they are, because Linux reinvented them decades later with lots of hype, but worse, in the form of user-level file systems and containers like Docker.

> They could have built those 2 features independently anyway.

Except you can't know which features will be a hit in advance, so your research prototype is only a failure if it never gets any adoption, and never inspires something better. Otherwise it was successful in exploring a design space, even if the result is negative.

Your argument is the same fallacy as the belief that publishing negative scientific results isn't important. Documenting failed experiments is just as important to growing our understanding as documenting successes.

Plan 9 was not a product though. You seem to be arguing against the concept of research in the software world.

It was packaged into a product called Inferno later on.

And it was only "research" because AT&T (or Lucent at the time?) couldn't sell it.

To be fair, Inferno was a bit different with the whole Limbo and VM thing. It really didn't have a chance being targeted at the same market as Java with a whole lot less ad / industry push. Lucent just never got it together for product pushes.

1995 was Lucent, and AT&T did enter the UNIX PC market in the 80's. I got to use a 3B2 in college in 91. Sadly, that was my first UNIX computer.

Inferno isn't Plan 9. Written by the same people, yes, but it's a different OS running on a virtual machine rather than x86, different programming language, etc. The main commonality is 9P, which enables some other similarities such as Acme, synthetic filesystems, etc.

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