Hacker News Reader

I've suspected; have no evidence to back this up, that "plan9" is a play on the roman numerals IX (9) at the end of "UN IX" and also that "research unix" never had a 9th or 10th version fully developed and released. And, TIL there's another thing called "IX"[1]

[1]https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/IX/

View on HN

Here's a funny thing I just found out: in chasing the reference cited by Wikipedia regarding the naming, I learned that UTF-8 was invented for Plan 9.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

My understanding was it was a work in progress and they showed it to one of the plan 9 guys who pointed out a way to make it better and then implemented it into plan 9, not that it was particularly originally for plan 9.

There is a pretty complete description of the origination of UTF-8 here:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Rob Pike opens with:

> Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is: 1. IBM designed UTF-8. 2. Plan 9 implemented it.

> That's not true. UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

ah, thanks for the source!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com