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  3. preface3
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  6. <H1>Preface to the Third (2000) Edition
  7. </H1>
  8. <br>&#32;<br>
  9. A great deal has happened to Plan 9 in the five years since its last release.
  10. Although much of the system will seem familiar, hardly any aspect
  11. of it is unchanged.
  12. The kernel has been heavily reworked;
  13. the graphical environment completely rewritten;
  14. many commands added, deleted, or replaced;
  15. and the libraries greatly expanded.
  16. Underneath, though, the same approach to computing remains:
  17. a distributed system that uses file-like naming to access and
  18. control resources both local and remote.
  19. <br>&#32;<br>
  20. Some of the changes are sweeping:
  21. <DL>
  22. <DT><DT>&#32;<DD>
  23. Alef is gone, a casualty of the cost of maintaining multiple languages, compilers,
  24. and libraries in a diverse world,
  25. but its model for processes, tasks, and communication lives on
  26. in a new thread library for C.
  27. <DT><DT>&#32;<DD>
  28. Support for color displays is much more general, building on a new
  29. alpha-blending graphical operator called
  30. <TT>draw</TT>
  31. that replaces the old
  32. <TT>bitblt</TT>.
  33. Plan 9 screens are now, discreetly, colorful.
  34. <DT><DT>&#32;<DD>
  35. A new mechanism called plumbing connects applications together
  36. in a variety of ways, most obviously in the support of multimedia.
  37. <DT><DT>&#32;<DD>
  38. The interfaces to the panoply of rotating storage devices have been
  39. unified and extended,
  40. while providing better support for having Plan 9 coexist with other
  41. operating systems on a single disk.
  42. <DT><DT>&#32;<DD>
  43. Perhaps most important, this release of the system is being done under
  44. an open source agreement, providing cost-free source-level access to the
  45. software.
  46. </dl>
  47. <br>&#32;<br>
  48. Plan 9 continues to be the work of many people.
  49. Besides those mentioned in the old preface,
  50. these people deserve particular note:
  51. Russ Cox did much of the work updating the graphics
  52. and creating the new disk and bootstrap model
  53. as well as providing a number of new commands;
  54. David Hogan ported Plan 9 to the Dec Alpha;
  55. and
  56. Sape Mullender wrote the new thread library.
  57. <br>&#32;<br>
  58. Other new contributors include
  59. Bruce Ellis,
  60. Charles Forsyth,
  61. Eric Van Hensbergen,
  62. and
  63. Tad Hunt.
  64. <br>&#32;<br>
  65. <DL><DT><DD>
  66. <DL><DT><DD>
  67. <DL><DT><DD>
  68. <DL><DT><DD>
  69. <DL><DT><DD>
  70. <DL><DT><DD>
  71. <DL><DT><DD>
  72. <DL><DT><DD>
  73. Bell Labs
  74. <br>
  75. Computing Science Research Center
  76. <br>
  77. Murray Hill NJ
  78. <br>
  79. June, 2000
  80. <br>&#32;<br>
  81. <A href=http://www.lucent.com/copyright.html>
  82. Copyright</A> &#169; 2000 Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.
  83. </body></html>