Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace

Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by LukeShu on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @02:31PM (#26558468)

I was going to say, 30 years ago, the 1st edition of the actual Plan 9 wasn't yet released (not until 1992), much less a clone/port of its shell. But it seems that Byron Rakitzis wrote his Unix clone of `rc` in 1991 before Plan 9 was even out! He based it on Tom Duff's paper which described Plan 9's shell.

(Plan 9's `rc` was originally written for 10th edition Unix, and would later get ported back to Unix as part of Russ Cox's plan9port in 2003.)

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by byronr on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @02:36PM (#26558537)

Yes, I did! I used Duff's paper as a reference, and relied on the good taste of all my beta testers to guide me towards a working shell. Back when source code was distributed via shar files in an email.

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by PeterWhittaker on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @04:12PM (#26559820)

Thanks for writing rc! I’d forgotten about Duff’s paper and the exact circumstances of rc’s release until I read LukeShu’s and your replies.

I had a lot of fun with rc....

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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace by byronr on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @05:42PM (#26560737)

It's hosted on github now and still serves as the login shell for me and presumably many others!

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