History
| Date | Release | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1992 | Plan 9 1st Edition | Released by Bell Labs to universities |
| 1995 | Plan 9 2nd Edition | Released by Bell Labs for non-commercial purposes |
| 2000 | Plan 9 3rd Edition (Brazil) | Released by Lucent Technologies under an open source license for non-commercial use |
| 2002 | Plan 9 4th Edition | Released by Lucent Technologies under a new free software license |
Plan 9 was a Bell Labs internal project from its start during the mid 1980s. It replaced Unix as Bell Labs's primary platform for operating systems research. It explored several changes to the original Unix model that facilitate the use and programming of the system, notably in distributed multi-user environments. In 1992, Bell Labs provided the first public release to universities, and three years later a commercial second release version became available to the general public. In the late 1990s, Lucent Technologies, having inherited Bell Labs, dropped commercial support for the project. In 2000, a non-commercial third release was distributed under an open source license. A fourth release under a new free software license occurred in 2002.
A user and development community, including current and former Bell Labs members and Massachusetts Institute of Technology personnel, continues to produce minor daily releases in form of ISO images. Bell Labs still hosts the development. The development source tree is accessible over the 9P and HTTP protocols and is used to update existing installations. In addition to the official components of the OS included in the ISOs, Bell Labs also hosts a repository of externally developed applications and tools.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs was originally developed by members of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, the same group that originally developed UNIX and C. The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis.
Read more about this topic: Plan 9 From Bell Labs
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–117)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)