Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace

Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by stormking on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @11:37AM (#26556270)

These "nice ideas about different types of file" are not new. On the contrary, before Unix, this was common and it was one of the revolutionary approaches of Unix, that files - from an OS perspective - should be streams of bytes and nothing more.

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by fnord123 on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @12:00PM (#26556567)

I think before UNIX there weren't nice APIs for different types of file access. It was more like getting a raw block device and being told "fill your boots".

stream-of-bytes was the right idea then. It doesn't mean it is still right.

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by stormking on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @12:30PM (#26556907)

You think wrong, it was exactly the same approach of defining a "nice API" for each type of file.

It failed.

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by nix23 on Friday March 26, 2021 @10:26AM (#26592547)

Before Multics...not UNIX ;)

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