[TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"

[Andrew Warkentin]

On 1/17/20, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo at alchemistowl.org> wrote:
>
> The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was
> embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive
> license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why
> Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my
> underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating
> systems which made Unix the choice?
>
Linus has always struck me as purely a pragmatist and not idealistic
at all, so I'm not surprised that he wrote a conventional Unix rather
than something more architecturally progressive.

On 1/17/20, Brantley Coile <brantley at coraid.com> wrote:
>
> Plan 9 solves the problem of "How do I make a bunch of machines look like a
> single system?" If you wanted to mess around with a system in the early
> 1990's you didn't have a bunch of people and a bunch of systems you needed
> to make appear as one. You just had a single box.
>
> So, my Plan 9 remains small. In fact, I've been removing things from it,
> like local disks, that is contrary to the original vision. (Or set of
> visions. I remember getting a lot of different answers form everyone
> involved in 1127 about what it was that they were doing.)
>
Wasn't the point of single-system-image clustering originally to allow
building relatively inexpensive systems with more CPUs than could
reasonably be fit into a single machine? Now that all current CPUs
except for some low-end embedded ones are multi-core and fully
programmable GPUs are ubiquitous, I don't think Plan 9/Amoeba-style
SSI is really all that relevant for anything other than HPC. However,
I do think distributed network-transparent sharing of devices and
services along the lines of QNX or Domain/OS is more relevant than
ever.