The TTY demystified

http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php

by surki • 17 years ago

93 13 17 years ago

linusakesson.net

skwiddor4• 17 years ago

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

They got rid of the TTY, huzzah!

cturner2• 17 years ago

Given how utterly cool plan9 is, I have some difficulty understanding how they so completely failed to find a userbase. I sometimes have wishful thinking that maybe google or someone like that is secretly running on plan 9 and that in time it will permeate out. But I think not. Anyway - not too important - the OS layer is becoming irrelevant (and yet when my parents asked what on earth I could want for my 30th I asked for a book on ncurses :) ).

dinkumthinkum• 17 years ago

So why exactly is the OS layer becoming irrelevant? Is this that idea that everything in technology will henceforth occur in a Web Browser ... perhaps in some HTML4 compatibility mode?

amix• 17 years ago

I don't think things win market share by how cool or powerful they are - e.g. Betamax vs. VHS OR SPARC vs. x86 OR Haskell vs. C. Why something becomes popular has to do a lot with timing, price and creating something that's "good enough".

Other than this, plan9 is/was really cool and has a lot of interesting concepts (like a distributed architecture).

mrduncan• 17 years ago

Given how utterly cool plan9 is, I have some difficulty understanding how they so completely failed to find a userbase.

I think the reason it never became popular is that the existing popular operating systems have been (to this point) good enough. There just hasn't been a compelling enough reason to invest the time and energy in switching. I think the only way you'll see a large switch is if a "killer app" comes out which takes advantage of Plan 9's features which wouldn't be possible on other OSs.

thristian• 17 years ago

Legend has it that after AT&T stomped all over their fun little research OS by turning it into a popular product and all the tedious concerns like "backward compatibility" that entails, the creators of Unix got together and said, 'right, we'll make a new OS and give it the least marketable name we can imagine so that it will never be taken away from us and ossified'.

Although I've never used Plan 9 myself (I don't think I've ever owned hardware it would boot on), I am impressed by the features I've read about, and I wish it had become more popular... but on the other hand, I'm quite happy with the chording-free and keyboard-friendly UIs I have available.

skwiddor4• 17 years ago

Plan 9 does have a userbase, albeit small it is >50 We have a GSoC entry http://gsoc.cat-v.org/ this year. Plan 9 is also used in some Lucent / Alcatel cell phone masts in RT mode. I know of three commercial companies with Plan 9 / Inferno based products.

Plan 9 was a for sale product when free Unices became the rage. When it became a free download, Plan 9 landed without a modern web browser in the days of the Web and we still don't have one. Until recently, with the addition of an AC97 driver, the only way to get sound was an 8 bit Soundblaster or difficult to find specific models of USB audio device. There's no video playback (unless you don't care if the sound syncs). So you end up needing two machines and only one of them expects to be just another node in the network and the other thinks it's the sentinel.

The TTY demystified

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