The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Bell Labs Has a Plan 9 of Its Own : Computers: The new system is designed to take advantage of today’s computer networks.
You’ve probably heard of the cult science fiction movie “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” directed by Hollywood schlockmeister Ed Wood. Now there’s Plan 9 From AT&T;’s Bell Labs, a rather more serious offering: it’s a brand new software operating system from the inventors of the 25-year-old Unix operating system.
Don’t look for Plan 9 at the local computer store. Bell Lab’s programmers developed it for their own use, and it will be sold--for $350 a copy--to customers much like themselves: university and corporate research scientists.
“Plan 9 is a really intellectual competitor,” said Dennis Ritchie, head of the Computing Techniques Research department and one of the two programmers who created Unix.
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Rob Pike, a researcher who helped write the program, named it “Plan 9.” “I had just seen the movie the day before we had a meeting in which we talked about a name for the project,” he said. “I came up with Plan 9 and it stuck. I still think it’s a good name. It’s a comment on the expected quality of the results.”
His thinking: a futuristic name for a product ahead of its time.
The new operating system has been designed to take advantage of today’s powerful computer networking technologies. Software applications running on one computer can be accessed by anyone connected to that machine, no matter their location. The software can run on a variety of different types of computer hardware--a concept popularized by Unix--but with code that is “smaller and cleaner” than Unix, it can run on the smallest of appliances, even a telephone.
Unix was also developed by Bell Labs for internal use and was also popular at first mainly with universities and researchers. It was only after the 1984 divestiture that AT&T; began marketing it as a commercial product, and though it is considered by many to be a brilliant piece of software, it has suffered from a proliferation of different versions, and has never been very popular on personal computers.
Ritchie, who wrote Unix with his partner Ken Thompson, said: “Although it was not an overnight commercial success, it has influenced a lot of [software developers].” Among them was Pike, who came to Bell Labs because of his love of Unix.
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Several years ago, he and Thompson began work on Plan 9, with Ritchie as their supervisor. “As a programmer, sometimes your ideas dry up and you get promoted into management,” Ritchie said. “Ken is still working. Programming is just what he does.”
Plan 9 will appeal only to a small percentage of those who work on computers.
Said Pike: “What we hope is that people will take the technology in Plan 9 and apply is to their own systems.”
