[TUHS] FD 2

[Brantley Coile]

I have my own theory on why Plan 9 never caught on. It was never productized.
It was a modern system arriving right at the post modern age emerged so it
didn't resonate with the folks who were doing things. It was too early to
be recognized as a cloud operating system, which is what it really is.

I say "is" because we actually use it and have done so since 1995. We still
ship appliances based on it. We do all our development on it. I have dumps
on our file server (Ken's) going back to Jun 22, 2004. 

I can't really know for sure, but I think those are the three reasons:
never made a product, modern not post modern, too early for the cloud.

Brantley Coile


> On Jan 30, 2023, at 2:03 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:18 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:09:03AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:45 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>>> Plan 9 was different, and a lot of people who were familiar with Unix
>>>>> didn't like that, and were not interested in trying out a different
>>>>> way if it meant that they couldn't bring their existing mental models
>>>>> and workflows into the new environment unchanged.
>>>>> 
>>>>> At one point it struck me that Plan 9 didn't succeed as a widespread
>>>>> replacement for Unix/Linux because it was bad or incapable, but
>>>>> rather, because people wanted Linux, and not plan9.
>>>> 
>>>> Many people make that mistake.  New stuff instead of extend old stuff.
>>> 
>>> Some would argue that's not a mistake. How else do we innovate if
>>> we're just incrementally polishing what's come before?
>> 
>> I didn't say limit yourself to polishing, I said try and not invalidate
>> people's knowledge while innovating.
>> 
>> Too many people go down the path of doing things very differently and
>> they rationalize that they have to do it that way to innovate.  That's
>> fine but it means it is going to be harder to get people to try your
>> new stuff.
>> 
>> The point I'm trying to make is that "different" is a higher barrier,
>> much, much higher, than "extend".  People frequently ignore that and
>> that means other people ignore their work.
>> 
>> It is what it is, I doubt I'll convice anyone so I'll drop it.
> 
> Oh, I don't know. I think it's actually kind of important to see _why_
> people didn't want to look deeper into plan9 (for example). The system
> had a lot to offer, but you had to dig a bit to get into it; a lot of
> folks never got that far. If it was really lack of job control, then
> that's a shame.
> 
>        - Dan C.