Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: OS cost component of workstation
Message-ID: <1990Nov19.164716.11506@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <11619@alice.att.com> <3775@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1990Nov17.212300.22987@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov18.192626.19401@robobar.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 90 16:47:16 GMT

In article <1990Nov18.192626.19401@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>> Uh, as I understand it, the words "available" and "Plan 9" do not go
>> together.  It is a research effort, not a commercial product.
>
>We-ell...  A few of the Plan 9 developers who spoke at the EUUG conference
>this July did say that they had some intentions to make it available...
>but gave no details as to timescale or on what terms or to whom.

A further caution here:  based on the early history of Unix, if Plan 9 does
become available, what you're getting will probably be a slightly-flakey
research prototype, not an industrial-strength system that can be relied
on "straight out of the box" for heavy production use.  Shaking a research
system down into a robust production system is a lot of work, and I suspect
it's rather peripheral to the purposes of the research people.  (For all
the messes the USG people made in PWB, and Berkeley made in 4.1BSD, they
did put an awful lot of work into making the system run reliably and
efficiently, to the point where the Murray Hill research people "bought
back" a lot of that work for V7 and V8 respectively.)
-- 
"I don't *want* to be normal!"         | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry."                        |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry