History
| Date | Release | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Inferno Beta | Released by Bell Labs |
| May 1997 | Inferno Release 1.0 | Winter 1997 Bell Labs Technical Journal Article |
| July 1999 | Inferno 2nd Edition | Released by Lucent's Inferno Business Unit |
| June 2001 | Inferno 3rd Edition | Released by Vitanuova |
| 2004 | Inferno 4th Edition | Open Source release; changes to many interfaces (incompatible with earlier editions); includes support for 9P2000. |
Inferno is a descendant of Plan 9, and shares many design concepts and even source code in the kernel, particularly around devices and the Styx/9P2000 protocol. Inferno shares with Plan 9 the Unix heritage from Bell Labs and the Unix philosophy. Many of the command line tools in Inferno were Plan 9 tools that were translated to Limbo.
In March–April 1997 IEEE Internet Computing included an ad for Inferno networking software. It claimed that various devices could now communicate over "any network" including the Internet, telecommunications and LANs. The ad stated that video games could talk to computers (a PlayStation was pictured), cell phones could access email and there was voice mail via TV.
Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy, members of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, designed and developed the C programming language to build the operating system Unix. Programmers at Bell Labs went on to develop the Plan 9 and Inferno operating system, which were engineered for modern distributed environments.
Lucent used Inferno in at least two internal products: the Lucent VPN Firewall Brick, and the Lucent Pathstar phone switch. They initially tried to sell source code licenses of Inferno but found few buyers. Lucent did little marketing and missed the importance of the Internet and Inferno's relation to it. During the same time Sun Microsystems was heavily marketing its own Java programming language, which was targeting a similar market, with analogous technology, that worked in web browsers and also filled the demand for object-oriented languages popular at that time. Lucent licensed Java from Sun, claiming that all Inferno devices would be made to run Java. A Java byte code to Dis byte code translator was written to facilitate that. However, Inferno still did not find customers.
The Inferno Business Unit closed after three years, and was sold to Vitanuova. Once Vitanuova owned the rights, it continued development and offered commercial licenses to the complete system, and free downloads and licenses (not GPL compatible) for all the system except the kernel and VM. They ported the software to new hardware and focused on distributed applications. Eventually, Vitanuova released the source under the GPL license and the Inferno operating system is now a Free/Libre/Open Source Software project.
Read more about this topic: Inferno (operating System)
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