term% cat index.txt Various man pages.
9FRONT
Plan 9 from The People's Front of Cat-v.org, a fork of the Plan 9 from Bell
Labs operating system after the front fell off.
- 9front.org
PLAN 9
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting
in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob
Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others
as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
- plan9.bell-labs.com
Plan 9 is a distributed computing environment assembled from separate
machines acting as terminals, CPU servers, and file servers. A user
works at a terminal, running a window system on a raster display. Some
windows are connected to CPU servers; the intent is that heavy computing
should be done in those windows but it is also possible to compute on the
terminal. A separate file server provides file storage for terminals and
CPU servers alike.
- Plan 9 from Bell Labs manual, volume 1, section 1, intro
By the mid 1980's, the trend in computing was away from large centralized
time-shared computers towards networks of smaller, personal machines,
typically UNIX 'workstations'. People had grown weary of overloaded,
bureaucratic timesharing machines and were eager to move to small,
self-maintained systems, even if that meant a net loss in computing power.
As microcomputers became faster, even that loss was recovered, and this
style of computing remains popular today.
- Plan 9 from Bell Labs manual, volume 2