Bell Labs or Microsoft security?

Thu Jan 30 02:14:35 UTC 2003

On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Daniel Karrenberg wrote:

> PPS: Plan 9 anyone?

Anything but _THAT_! At some period of my life I was paid to make
something resembling production system out of Plan 9... it has all the
quality features of v6 Unix, and looks like some student's course project.
There were some interesting ideas, but the coding style was totally
atrocious.  Like, fixed size tables everywhere (oh, you run out of 100
open files, toooo baaaad), little charmers like TCP ACKs being sent in
20ms timer call-backs (so it works awfully great over 100Mbps ethernet :),
text-based interfaces requiring padding with spaces to some fixed-length
strings, and a zillion other quick hacks.

"You are in a maze or little twisting cross-mounts, all alike" :)

To summarize original Unix design & coding style very very concisely:

% ed
s/a/b/
?

That "?" says all.  As a matter of fact, 30 years later ed still says "?".

--vadim