From: spitzak@gree.Eng.Sun.COM (Bill Spitzak)
Newsgroups: comp.os.research
Subject: Plan 9
Date: 3 Oct 1992 02:24:51 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.cse.ucsc.edu
Originator: osr@ftp

So many people mailed me requesting that I forward to them whatever I
found out about Plan 9 that I decided to post it here.  However, I
discovered very little:

1. A beta version of Plan 9 is available to some universities and
may be made available to many more soon.

2. The only documentation that you can get are the "early papers"
which are quite interesting and recommended reading if you have not
seen them already.  They are available by anonymous ftp to
research.att.com, as /dist/plan9docs/*.Z.  These are PostScript
so you need a PostScript previewer or printer to read them.

Here are some of the more interesting letters I got, edited slightly:

----
    
>What has happened to Plan 9?  Does it exist?  Is it available?  Is there any
>other documentation other than the "early papers" available?
  
It certainly does exist. We (CS Dept at Sydney University) are the beta
testers and have had it since April. We are currently testing the CDROM
version.  I don't know of any other documentation other than the early
papers that has been released.

Bob Kumerfeld

---

From: matty@orthanc.cs.su.oz.au

You'll have to check with the labs as to what the details are
with the release.  We have been one of the test sites
for the draft as well as the pre-release version, so yes, it does exist.
The labs may release it soon.  I have seen very little else besides
the early papers myself except for the documentation (on-line and otherwise)
which is publicly available although I don't know where you can get it from,
probably the labs again (ours came with our distribution).

Oh, and it's great fun to play/work with.  ;-)

					Matty.
---

From: Mark Verber <verber@parc.xerox.com>

I haven't seen any papers on Plan9 since "the early papers".  Plan9
does exist and is used by 50-100 people on a daily basis.  Some of the
RG11 folks brought Plan9 running on AT&T Safari 386 laptops to summer
usenix where we got to play with them.

Originally Pike said that Plan9 would never leave Bell Labs because
the community that polluted UNIX would pollute his pretty Plan9.  After
about two years of badgering Rob and the other people in the group
decided that they would do a limited (source only) release to selected
universities.  It would be up to the university to figure out how to
get to run systems from the sources.  Last I heard, the release will
be still limited to university, but the distribution (which is on CDrom)
will include full documentation, sources, and network bootable images
for at least 3 machine archs.

I believe two schools have the distribution right now in "beta" form
while they work out distribution bugs, and then at least 20 other schools
are getting copies.

There are some non AT&T people who are looking at writing a Plan9
work-a-like, but they are first looking into some legal issues.
Specifically, they understand that two of the critical ideas in Plan 9
have been patented (eg like the SUID bit method of protection).
<<what about Unix clones?>>

--mark

---

From: ches@research.att.com

Those <<the early papers>> are all the papers available.  That
directory will be updated with further papers as they are published.
I believe a couple have been accepted for the winter Usenix.

---

From: rob@research.att.com  << i.e. Rob Pike >>

plan 9 is released and available to universities.  the manual is
released and in principle available to anyone, but no distribution
mechanism is in place so it's at the moment still unobtainable except
by special request.  (no, you can't have it: we are not going to send
any out until we have a sensible mechanism in place.)

-rob

---

Thanks to everybody who tried to help me out.
Bill Spitzak