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Re:Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995) [pdf] by soong on Monday March 09, 2015 @07:00PM (#9174678)
You have it pretty much the other way around. The reason we have to rely on all this stuff like

* NFS, CIFS, etc for networked files

* Kerberos for network wide auth

* LDAP for network wide user management

* basically all http abuse for music/Video streaming etc.

is because our OSes still follow the 70s One-Big-Machine-Many-Dumb-Teletypes-Paradigm. Basically all our devices, from the biggest server to the smallest Smartphone, think they are a Mainframe. The rest, including networking in general, is fumbled on top.

This is ugly at best but becomes a real PITA as soon as you have to deal with a couple of machines(BYOD or not).

Exactly because the computing landscape has changed from mainframes to networks of desktops was plan9 developed. An OS where it doesn't matter anymore if a resource is local or on the network.

Following your line of thought, since computers become more and more capable, soon we wont need networks at all.

EDIT: Btw. resources here means anything, from all HW devices to the Text in an open editor. Every file can be exported and in plan9 really everything is a file.

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