“Five years following the last release, take three of Bell Labs’
Plan 9 operating system (OS), source code and documentation
currently is available for download at the project’s Web site.”
“According to Lucent Technologies spokesperson Patrick
Regan, Bell Labs is Lucent’s research and development arm, and Plan
9 was spawned from from the same pool as UNIX and the C
languages.”
“Plan 9 uses a single protocol to refer to and communicate with
processes, programs, and data, including aspects of both the user
interface and the network. In this way the system provides a
uniform means of access to diverse computing resources, which may
be distributed across a network of servers, terminals, and other
devices,” Regan said. “A user could easily engage a number of
different programs running on geographically dispersed computers in
a single session — including hardware and software that might be
considered practically incompatible — without needing to know or
care about the details.”