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.