Apr 11, 2021 16:00:00

The rights of the distributed OS 'Plan 9 from Bell Labs' developed by the UNIX development team have been transferred to the open source community.

UNIX is the OS that was developed by Nokia Bell Labs in the United States together with C language and became the prototype of macOS and Linux. In the 1980s, the team that developed the UNIX announced that Bell Labs had transferred the copyright to the Plan 9 Foundation , an open source community, for the OS 'Plan 9 from Bell Labs,' which was developed separately from UNIX.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace! --Noxy Bell Labs
https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/plan-9-bell-labs-cyberspace/

UNIX was the world's first revolutionary operating system designed in a high-level language, used as the operating system for various mainframes, workstations, and servers, and became the foundation of the Internet and cloud infrastructure. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, by the team that developed the UNIX, isn't very well known, but it was ahead of some of the underlying concepts of today's distributed computing systems, Weldon said.

The development of Plan 9 from Bell Labs was led by a group led by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who were involved in the development of UNIX, and Rob Pike, who is known as the 'father of Go.'

The motivation for developing Plan 9 from Bell Labs was to build an operating system that fits the dispersed world in a 'clean and elegant way.' Also, the concept was to start a new design from scratch, not on a UNIX basis.

The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the movie ' Plan 9 from Outer Space ' directed by Ed Wood, which was produced in 1959. Plan 9 from Outer Space was so badly criticized that the screening rights were bought cheaply, and as a result, it was aired many times in the middle of the night on American terrestrial broadcasting, so it is known as a work that gained cult popularity in some parts. It has been.

In UNIX, it is assumed that multiple terminals are connected to one network and the system is built with devices in the local environment. However, Plan 9 from Bell Labs was built around a model that was radically different from traditional operating systems, and was built as a collection of loosely coupled services that could be hosted on different machines. Plan 9 from Bell Labs can assign a private namespace to each process so that if you replace the current service with another service that offers the same functionality, the programs that use that service do not need to change. It has become.

The Plan 9 from Bell Labs initiative has been adopted by other operating systems. For example, the concept of making OS services available through a file system has been incorporated into Linux. Also, the UTF-8 character encoding that is widely used today was devised and implemented for Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

by Renée French

Despite various groundbreaking efforts, Plan 9 from Bell Labs was released as a commercial operating system in 1995, but it was judged impossible to commercialize it, and it was open sourced in 2000. I did. The hosting was still hosted by Bell Labs, but all copyright was transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation, which will now lead the development of Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

'We Nokia and Bell Labs are open source to develop pioneering systems that will benefit the global software development community,' said Marcus Weldon, Corporate CTO of Bell Labs. We support the power of the community. Plan 9 from Bell Labs will surely be part of the decentralized cloud infrastructure that underpins the upcoming industrial revolution. '