I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more choice. Amiga, Atari St, Mac, SGI, Sun, NeXT, and a whole lot more.
Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.
Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainframe. If you want to extend the analogy further we even pay for time in a convenient monthly subscription, whether that be Netflix's cloud or your favorite remote music service.
Circling back to plan9, it really was the ideal system, and for the way things are going these days, it's really only a matter of time before we see the return of Plan9 or something built in effigy of it. I say this with a straight face, from the filesystem to the network model, from top to bottom Plan9 was a new paradigm that extended on the original Unix system in ways we still haven't replicated today in a mainstream environment the way it was then. The way the network layer and system layer intertwined to form an actual everythings-a-file system was bonkers the first time I tried it, coming from the Linux world where this claim is often made and isn't always true.
Now that the 9 system is back in the community's hands it's just going to take one group to be the next Inferno, similar to redhat, and put on the suits and ask for money and youll see the rest of the industry start to join in. It might just be my tainted opinion as a Gopher, but we're letting good stuff go to waste, we should be evolving this technology while the creators are still around to give input about their vision.
Glenda will ride again, I just hope I'm alive to see it.
Also, the color scheme is truly based, as the kids say.
EMACS is essentially SAP+github+Office(including Visio and Power Automate) for your own offcloud usage. If you think about it.
The whole obsolescence through a glued on battery and all the other nastiness of modern mobiles does make a point though. They do want their recurring revenue streams for cloud resources. But that essentially moves the mountable resources to a provider.
programming languages are ONLY communication layers between human and computer, they are not some voodoo, gift from god, so these layers can be made to suit human needs.
instead of browser downloading blob from facebook, your package manager will dowload it, and that can be made over P2P (like torrent) because you do not need it in 0.000001 sec. it will sit in cache. and this can be signed with current certification authority ecosystem almost without change to provide safe downloads.
I’ve thought about this for a while. All sorts of different architectures, companies, protocol, etc. whereas computing seems to be a massive monoculture now. We basically only have a handful of operating systems, most of which are based off something from decades ago, basically only two architectures still succeeded and one of them just seems to be hacks piled on top of hacks, etc.
I get that there’s a reason certain stuff won out, but it’s just boring to me personally.
Even compared to not that long ago, I look at PC cases from 10-15 years ago and see a ton of cool and unique designs, anything from recent times seems to be reduced to “white or black case with flashy lights”.