Plan 9 from AT&T Bell Laboratories - FAQ

Compiled by the tireless Mark V. Shaney.

• Question: What is Plan 9?

• Answer: Plan 9 is a new user interface in which any word on the screen can be imported from another machine.

• Answer: Plan 9 is a programmable debugger that understands multiple-process programs, and except at its own console, it doesn’t run as an exercise in understanding the principles and mechanisms useful in designing operating systems, and not as a product as such. In this way it is analogous to the Unix operating system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of networks, including Ethernet, Datakit, specially-built fiber networks, ordinary modem connections, and ISDN. In Plan 9, each network presents itself as a product as such.

• Question: What GUIs does it use?

• Answer: The standard interface doesn’t use icons; Plan 9 people tend to be local files.

• Question: How does it need?

• Answer: As might be expected, the answer depends on what kind of information appear to users and to a program on another machine. Plan 9 window system can grow. That is besides creating, deleting, and arranging the windows themselves its job is be a server for translating human-readable addresses to network-specific ones. As a result, applications don’t even know whether the network interface files can be monitored by running it under a server that runs on Plan 9, so that file systems of Unix machines may be running on a hardware plaform different from its own. As a side benefit, this approach means that the window system has been built over the past several years by the Computing Science Research Center of AT&T Bell Laboratories as an exercise in understanding the principles and mechanisms useful in designing operating systems, and not as a command by clicking on it, and any string can specify a file with a library that emulates the Berkeley socket interface.
  The system supports the graphics primitives and libraries of basic software for building GUIs, and if need arises, the X window system can grow.

• Question: Who is using Plan 9?

• Answer: Plan 9 people tend to be negotiated. Just as in the Unix environment. Data structures and protocols are designed for distributed computing on machines of diverse design. Except for necessarily machine-dependent parts of the past.

• Question: Is it object-oriented?

• Answer: No, not in the plan9 directory; they are running; where, and on what you want to do. The Plan 9 program is dynamically and individually adjustable for each of the technology for non-commercial purposes, and will also be ready to license it for commercial purposes on terms to be displayed.