Small but mighty, 9Front's 'Humanbiologics' is here for the truly curious 9Front, the main project continuing development of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, has emitted another new version, as enigmatic but significant as ever. "Humanbiologics" is the latest release from the 9Front project, replacing last June's release, codenamed "Don't touch the artwork". The names, like the project's homepage, are …
... "if you can really come up with a better idea, demonstrate it! (See Plan9, for example.) But if/when your potential users collectively say "YUCK!", perhaps leave it on the shelf until the rest of the planet is as enlightened as you are. (See Plan9, for example.)"
It's a good OS, it works, and if you're a techie it is well worth fiddling about with. But it's not for everybody, nor does it pretend otherwise.
[Author here]
> But it's not for everybody
Neither was Unix until Mac OS X. Linux *definitely* wasn't even back then. Ubuntu made it easier, Android improved on that, and ChromeOS brought some of that to the laptop market.
Unless someone somewhere puts the effort in, it never will be.
These days I honestly find "good" and "for everybody" to be mutually exclusive properties. Many projects have to walk a very gray wall, full of compromise.
I personally have found 9front to be very welcoming, particularly through my (admittedly brief) chats about git9 with Ori Bernstein (ori@) a while back.
[Author here]
> OSX/Android/ChromeOS isn't Unix
So, a few things about that.
№ 1: Always look at the dateline.
«
My Unix is a general purpose operating system
January 23, 2013
»
A lot has changed in a decade -- very nearly 11 years.
Macs outsold by Chromebooks. Linux on successful mainstream games consoles running Windows games. Microsoft offering a Linux environment in Windows, Linux distros of its own, apps as well as programming tools for Linux, etc.
№ 2:
Quoting from it...
«
where the line is between Unix and non-Unix is ultimately one of feel (and varies from person to person).
»
Well, I think he's wrong on this. Android is a general-purpose OS used by over _a billion people_ and for many, including my own wife, it's their sole computer.
Equally iOS: I know people doing everything on their iPhone and/or iPad for a decade or more now. My own startup was killed off by the iPad.
It doesn't matter what some Unix beardies think at hallmarks, like piping between or plain text files or whatever.
Linux *is* Unix now.
I argued this at the start of the year and I stand by it:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
Everything else is a rounding error except Apple's XNU and it's massively smaller than Linux. Maybe 50% of units but 10% or less of total volumes.
Linux > Apple XNU > xBSD > all commercial Unix.
> I wasn't talking about Linux.
You said:
> > OSX/Android/ChromeOS isn't Unix
OS X isn't called that any more. It's called macOS now. It is 100% certified UNIX™:
On Intel:
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3705.htm
On Arm:
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm
So, that claim is wrong. MacOS is a UNIX™.
ChromeOS is Linux. Standard kernel, standard userland. I have written about this at length:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/18/linux_desktop_debate/
Android is slightly more debatable because it uses a nonstandard non-GPL libC and other things, but it is still Linux.
And Linux is UNIX™.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
"And Linux is UNIX™."
"Linux" is the kernel. It is not today, and never will be, certified to use the UNIX trademark.
Some distros have been so certified, but not all of them, not by a long shot.
A Linux distribution is a Unix, but very, very few are certified to use the term UNIX™.
"and you'd never know."
YOU might not ever know, but I certainly would.
Apple's OSes based on Darwin are certainly Unixes, by almost any metric, being based on, working like (mostly), and feeling very much like BSD, (by way of NexTSTEP in some cases) (if you allow them to come out of their Apple-inflicted iShell).
ChromeOS and Android are clearly Linux distributions, because they use the Linux Kernel, and as such are clearly flavo(u)rs of Unix.
Arguing otherwise is dancing on the head of a pin territory.
"The legalistic definition of Unix would exclude research Unixes though, so how good a definition is it really?"
Ah. I see where you are going now.
Linux, BSD, Apple's Darwin-based contributions, Android and ChromeOS are all Unix in scope and feel.
What they are not is examples of UNIX[tm], unless they have paid to use that trademark.
Kind of like the definition of "organic" food, which means the farmer has paid a state agency a fee to verify that said food was grown to a certain standard. Personally, I refuse to pay that rather high fee (which I would have to pass on to my customers), so I can't sell it as "Organic", even though it is, in fact, grown to that exact same standard (some would say better, actually).
However, there is nothing stopping me from marketing it as "organically grown".
UNIX[tm] is "Organic" ... Unix is organically grown. Two like products, one of which has paid money for an additional virtually meaningless tag ... the cost of which needs to be passed along to the consumer.
Odd thing that I've noticed ... The people selling "organically grown" and "certifiably organic" and the like will be far more likely to show you around their farm than somebody with an official "Organic" certification. One wonders what the latter are hiding.
\it depends on what you mean by "everyone". Back in the '80s ad '90s a lot of small businesses ran on the likes of NCR Towers, MIPS and later SCO on various PC-based servers. The users were connected by dumb terminals or terminal emulation on PCs and completely unaware of what lay beneath as all they saw were their task-specific applications and some sort of menu. It put a multiuser system within reach of everyone who was a small business owner. That may not be literally "everyone" but then not everyone uses MacOS either.
"Neither was Unix until Mac OS X."
I beg to differ. For example, many Vet clinics ran on SCO Unix[0] starting in the mid '80s. There aren't many groups of professionals that are less computer literate that Vets and their staff, but the PSI/IDEXX Veterinary Practice Management system worked quite nicely for them, with minimal training.
It's all in the wetware of the software's distribution management. They understood what Vet Clinics needed, and provided it. The core OS for most people doesn't matter, it's all about the application software they are running, and proper training for same.
Yes, one could say the same for Plan9 ... once PSI/IDEXX starts making practice management software for it. Which will in all likelihood never happen.
For the record, I actually like Plan9 ... but IMO, it's a solution looking for a problem. I hope it finds one. Or many.
[0] Note to the youngsters: That's the proper, original SCO, not the later, perverted SCO of litigation fame.
[Author here]
> For example, many Vet clinics ran on SCO Unix[0] starting in the mid '80s.
I put in a good few SCO Xenix and later SCO Unix boxes running Tetraplan and other apps in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The apps were relatively user-friendly, but if the user never sees the actual OS and only an app or apps, then I don't think that says anything at all about the friendliness of the OS.
For me, Inferno was friendlier than Plan 9, but it is even more obscure. I am researching a possible future article on it.
"I don't think that says anything at all about the friendliness of the OS."
I didn't say it did. What I said was that the friendliness (or lack thereof) of the OS is not important when the system as a whole is setup by somebody who understands the needs of the enduser. Another example: For almost twenty years now, my computer-illiterate DearOldMum has been quite happy running the cut-down version of Slackware that I built for her ... and Slack is supposedly one of the "hard" distros.
"For me, Inferno was friendlier than Plan 9, but it is even more obscure."
I fiddled about with Inferno on and off from very late '96 until the early 2000s, but found it rather pointless other than as a learning environment for concepts.
"I am researching a possible future article on it."
Looking forward to your take on it.
All OSes are friendly ... but most are quite picky about who their friends are.
Maybe also worth mentioning that fun as plan9 is to play with, when I last had a look the number & functionality of applications was quite limited * and with how its architected cannot readily "port" a non trivial Linux application to plan9.
In this web centric age, worth noting that the browsers available did not really cope with "modern" (over complex and JS heavy) web pages (but fine on "old skool" simpler web pages, of which there are sadly few these days)
IMHO Definitely fun to play with, but using it as your main OS not readily viable (unless you remote into a doze or Linux box and use that for web based activities & other actions the inbuilt applications do not handle well)
* This may have changed, it was a while ago, but I doubt it as adding / enhancing non trivial applications (e.g. browsers) always seemed at the bottom of the priority list of plan9.
> BTW is there any history available about the naming
I liked this HN comment:
«
Research Unix11 = Plan9
Research Unix12 = Inferno
»
That sounds about right to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Unix
So it's not because it came after Unix V8. There was a V8, V9 and V10, which started to incorporate networking. We (not me!) covered their release:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/30/old_unix_source_code_opened_for_study/
I think it's simply a tribute to the Ed Wood film.
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
Brian Kernighan on the name "Plan 9" (possibly-apocryphal anecdote):
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18562164&cid=61209964
The other interesting point was that he felt like some gratuitous changes in Plan 9 were done at too low a level -- the system call level -- which made it difficult to bring along imperfect but useful code. But that ties into why the name Plan 9 was chosen. Because the most characteristic thing about the movie is its total lack of continuity.
The first one is "Plan 9".
The second is proof that the world's writers have completely lost the script, and have been reduced to remaking old classics. Honestly, ask yourself if the film industry as a whole has done anything new in the last quarter century. I usually use Tristar's release of Godzilla in 1998 as the point where Hollywood officially went TITSUP (Total Idiocy To Sucker an Underbred Public).
> using it as your main OS not readily viable (unless you remote into a doze or Linux box and use that for web based activities
I've started reducing my "web centric" lifestyle to something more like what I grew up with in the 90's. I'm fed up of the "hyper-web brain fudge" I have during my free time where every action or query I get/do seems to involve me jumping onto the net and getting distracted, not to mention the fact that when I do put the net down it constantly reaches out to me with notifications. I used to use dialup when I was a kid, or browse at school. There were clearly defined boundaries of online and offline.
Thus I have "offline time" on saturday mornings where anything that uses TCP/IP is left where it sits and I spend the morning watching good old live TV or something off a DVD, while reading a paper magazine during ad breaks. I'm quite enjoying catching episodes of Lovejoy or Minder.
But I also have started putting together machines running internet incapable OS's such as DOS/Win 3.1 partly to much about with old games and software but also to be a distraction free environment for doing "offline computing" as I call it. I have need for a win98 machine also for other software, particularly to run old CDROM/DVD encyclopaedias. I'm trying to retrain myself to check my encyclopaedias and other books for information, before using the web. If I'm going to keep buying "these books" then I suppose I better use them dammit, but like everyone else I'm trained like a monkey to pull out the phone or tablet and google or go direct to Wikipedia and ignore its citations (or lack of) as well as not checking what it said about the subject yesterday (does anyone actually think to check that the article hasn’t been vandalised I wonder).
I have a ton of offline only machines ranging from C64's and Acorn Electrons to the aforementioned Win98 box. I want to go back to using the web *when it is actually needed* and as a resource, not a lifestyle choice.
So Plan9 not having a browser that handles Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called these days is no big deal really. I might have fun learning to write a Gopher client instead.
Not your downvoter but your second sentence sets up a dichotomy that itself constitutes a number of assumptions about the contributors to 9front, not least that there is a collective view of any kind about what the purpose of the project is.
POSIWID might be the safest view.
http://sdf.org/plan9/
I recall a paper delivered by Rob Pike containing a lot of Plan9 details (AUUG Conference 1992, Darling Harbour, Sydney.) It was a real breath of fresh air at the time. Subsequently some of abstractions from Plan9 were adopted by Linux (born '92?), BSDs (386BSD '92 too?) and SysV.4.
In the thirty one years since IT generally hasn't become less crappy.
Since I have just laid my hands on a rpi5 I should try 9front on it - the pi would have a lot more grunt than the original gnots.
I wish I had the time and inclination to explore wacky different operating systems these days. Time was I'd order cheap CD copies of pretty much every Linux distribution out there and seemingly every week I'd be using a different distribution. Then those pesky adult responsibilities came along.
Still, I applaud anyone willing to buck the trend and try something different. One of the best things about open source is you're not beholden to shareholders or sales targets or anything like that. You can throw anything and everything at the wall and see what sticks. Seems such a shame to spend all that time and effort just doing bad copies of whatever Microsoft and Apple are doing when you could be trying to actually advance things. I hope one day one of these projects manages to gain some traction. Unix is an OS designed for a computing world that no longer exists, hasn't existed for decades, and people keep trying to twist and contort Linux to try to make the paradigm fit whatever need they have. Even Windows was designed for a very different era. Plan9's various successors probably aren't The Answer(tm), but at least it's trying something different.
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