I originally published this article in my gopherhole on February 22, 2022 [0]. Aside from a few formatting and spelling quirks, I did not change the content of this article and it is exactly the same as when I first published it.

I was pleasantly surprised to know that there is now a YouTube channel that is showcasing the daily use case for Plan 9 [1].

It is one of those software that I think really has a lot of potential especially today. It is built to act in a distributed computing environment where you can have multiple computers behave as a single computer that you can easily tap in and share devices with.

This means that you can use low-powered computers together to do bigger computing tasks. One idea that has been hanging over my head for a good while now is to have a number of Plan 9 machines that I can use to basically edit text and manage my document archives. I think having a couple of terminal Plan 9 systems as well as a cpu/fs/auth server can be especially powerful in that regard.

I have read a few of the Plan 9 papers but being that I’m not a programmer or a systems engineer I don’t really see its immediate use for someone that just wants to tinker with it. Some might argue that Plan 9 isn’t really built to be used by non-programmers.

However, I think its distributed features can lend itself some value to someone that is interested to have a mesh network of computers where he can access the same files across different computers. I think it was a few years ago when I first realized how innovative and creative that approach is. This idea of personal namespaces where you can pull the device file from other machines and read and write to it as if it is your local device is nothing short of magic.

I always think of Plan 9 in terms of a technology being wasted, and in some regard I still think that it is. But I am genuinely glad that someone who I presume to have a decent understanding of it is trying to make approachable and easy-to-digest demos of the operating system.

If you are someone who has multiple computers and you want to know how this personal namespace magic works. You can easily install a somewhat updated version of Plan 9 today [2]. Couple that with the YouTube channel that I’ve mentioned above and I think that would be a good introduction into this operating system.

[0] gopher://kalayaan.xyz/0/~rtr/guper/plan-9-youtube.txt [1] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yt2V7yYiPCQ [2] http://www.9front.org/releases/