ResearchPlan Nine From Bell Labs - and that's the best name for it!
What would computing be like in an alternate universe?
You may hear uber-geeks proclaim, whilst thumping their chest, that they've seen it all in the tech field. Next time you hear one bragging about the extensive nerding that they've done, how they ran BSD at work and compiled Linux From Scratch (yes, it's a distro!) at home, can type yacc parser code off the top of their head, have memorized every shortcut sequence in Emacs, and mumble Sparc assembly code in their sleep: ask them if they've run "Plan Nine From Bell Labs". Watch them stutter!
The "Plan Nine From Bell Labs" operating system - affectionately shortened to "plan9" - takes the prize as one of the most obscure operating systems ever; and yet it comes from none other than the same people who brought you those staples of technology, C, C++, and Unix. Named after the famous hack-sci-fi movie "Plan Nine From Outer Space", it hits it's namesake almost dead-on: difficult to sit through, warped and weird, almost unheard-of, and yet with an unique, innocent charm and a tiny cult following. Plan Nine in the computing world is 99% scoffed at and 1% defended tearfully by the kind of embattled loyalty not seen since the Amiga disappeared.
But you have to admit right off that there are a number of features that plan9 gets right: it is the only system to have Unicode UTF-8 as it's native character set. Those beholding a screenshot of it remark that it is pretty; with it's soft pastel colors, cute, fuzzy mascot (a bunny named "glenda"), and pixel-perfect fonts, it looks like a good Web 2.0-styled website. It's rio window manager is tastefully minimalist. It is designed for distributed multi-user environments from the ground up. Networking and embedded devices are it's target. They had better be, because the user interface is straight out of MC Escher.
The whole system is chock-full of off-the-wall features that you've never heard of in any other system. You type a file anywhere, with your cursor in the middle of anything, and just save it. There's no menu; open a terminal window, type the name of the program you want to run, and the terminal morphs into whatever program you told it to be until you kill it. Need to execute a command? Sure, just middle-click on it. Don't see the command? Well, just type it - again, anywhere! - and then middle-click it. You take a screenshot not with a special program, but simply by piping "/dev/screen" to a file. In fact, everything is a file to the system, including the network connection, your mouse actions, and the window it's running in. Speaking of the mouse, the system is set up so that you have no choice but to use it for many things, and it had better be a space-age mouse with a lot of buttons on it, too.
Are the commands intuitive? Oh, yes! Some of my favorites are "disk/kfscmd halt" which anybody can plainly see means to reboot, "{ cd /foo/; tar c .} | {cd /bar/; tar xvT}" which clearly copies the contents of directory 'foo' into directory 'bar', and "ls -l `{du -a $1 | awk '{print $2}'} | grep '^d-' | awk ' { print $10 }'", which obviously lists the contents of a directory. I mean, why would you even need to read the manual to run this? Is it madness, or genius, or both? The jury's still out. But after coming back to a regular operating system from the Wonderland tea-party of plan9, it takes a while for computer habits to return to normal.
Plan Nine was to be the next-generation of operating system research at Bell Labs facility. The early 1990's saw a couple commercial releases of plan9 before AT&T sold Bell Labs to Lucent technologies, which immediately dropped Plan Nine like a live scorpion as far as commercial interest goes. Plan Nine saw a third release by 2000 as an open source project, but actually didn't even qualify as open source and drew some outrage from the free software community for having a license that essentially made it impossible for anybody to use. This is where they missed the ball, since it could have taken the embedded system market by storm, but Lucent just sat on it and did nothing. It's fourth, and perhaps final, release was as free software as pure as the GNU GPL itself, only with even fewer restrictions - as this happened in 2002, it is said to be "nine years too late". Today, you can download it as a live CD which also installs, hack it, run it, resell it, or tile your walls with it, and if you can change it into something useful and make millions off of it, you're more than welcome to it.
There are companies which have done something slightly profitable with it, most notably Vita Nuova, which continues to maintain and market Inferno, a Plan 9 derivative targeted at set-top boxes and other embedded devices. Since plan9 has at last been liberated to the masses, it can now be salvaged; a devoted but tiny community of free developers have adopted it lovingly and are working on it night and day to finish it. Because that's the main problem with plan9: it is the world's most notoriously orphaned system. Almost certainly it's brightest days are yet ahead of it.