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Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

The deluxe, and generally just unusual, hardware probably did a lot to kill Plan 9 adoption, or would have if the license hadn't got there first. Unix seems to have been successful partly because it ran on the hardware that people already owned, or hardware they would have been likely to buy anyway.

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It wasn't even that deluxe at the time (especially not the display hardware). The hardware didn't help, the license didn't help, keeping it behind closed doors is what killed it.

The first 'ok to use commercially' release was in 2000, by the Linux had eaten up any market that Plan-9 could have conceivably had.

I think even then the weird mix of pro-windowing and anti-graphics app orientations were doomed to sink it. The fact that it was difficult to see how even a modern web browser would work (there were attempts, but half-hearted at best) really made breaking out of its limited niche very hard.

But if it had become sufficiently popular then someone would probably have just bodged X onto it (as unpleasant as that is to contemplate).

there was an x11 port to plan9. it's still there:

    $ cl -addr sources.cs.bell-labs.com:564
    9p> ls -l extra/X11.iso.bz2
    -rw-rw-r-- rsc sys 24878378		X11.iso.bz2
    9p>

that didn't sink plan9. what sank plan9 was that linux was there and was "good enough", and that it took a full decade to realize that the concepts of plan9 can't be backported to unix/linux piecemeal. that they fit much better together in a coherent system that didn't carry the baggage of unix (the root user, for example). this is what the original plan9 papers were trying to say: it's a rethinking, you have to cut the cord to eliminate the baggage. the baggage has proven sufficiently heavy that more than 20 years later you're not seeing private namespaces in linux. instead you see fully virtualized instances of the operating system -- with all the baggage that they carry -- and most efforts are focused on making them work efficiently, rather than on inventing something truly original.

that said, if plan9 was open sourced in 1995 and had taken over, we wouldn't be talking now about a linux behemoth bolting systemd onto itself, but a plan9 one. successful software grows itself into morbidity. plan9 would've been no different.

what's this `cl` program ?

At a guess an alias for 'lc' (list contents).

I think `ls` is list as in unix and `lc` is list columns, just like `ls|mc` `list` | `multicolumn`.

There is no manual page for `cl`, so thats probably a typo.

Apparently that port is used for the "plan 9 file service", so it's probably some kind of ftp-like client for 9p.

probably cl[ient] then

https://code.google.com/p/go9p/

That settles it https://code.google.com/p/go9p/source/browse/p/clnt/examples...

Thanks

Yes. So ironic that "worse is better", which was said about Unix vs Lisp Machines, worked this time again (Plan9 vs Linux).

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