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A comment on The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9 (1993). Parent comment

Re:The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9 (1993) by xiaq on Sunday July 05, 2015 @08:02AM (#9833253)
> As the paper outlines, a Plan 9 network needed at least a CPU server, file server and one or more terminals, plus possibly an authentication server (the CPU server might have been able to do this too).

... which can just be run on the same machine.

> Without this investment in hardware it was like trying to understand how NFS or web infrastructure works with only a single machine to work with.

Network transparency is an important feature, but not the only one. You are saying running X makes no sense because your X server and client are on the same machine.

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Re:The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9 (1993) by mhw on Sunday July 05, 2015 @10:05AM (#9833591)
> You are saying running X makes no sense because your X server and client are on the same machine.

No, I'm saying that it's hard to properly understand the advantages Plan 9 (or NFS or X or Hadoop) brings if all you have is one machine to run it on.

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