| 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384 |
- <html>
- <title>
- preface3
- </title>
- <body BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#330088" ALINK="#FF0044">
- <H1>Preface to the Third (2000) Edition
- </H1>
- <br> <br>
- A great deal has happened to Plan 9 in the five years since its last release.
- Although much of the system will seem familiar, hardly any aspect
- of it is unchanged.
- The kernel has been heavily reworked;
- the graphical environment completely rewritten;
- many commands added, deleted, or replaced;
- and the libraries greatly expanded.
- Underneath, though, the same approach to computing remains:
- a distributed system that uses file-like naming to access and
- control resources both local and remote.
- <br> <br>
- Some of the changes are sweeping:
- <DL>
- <DT><DT> <DD>
- Alef is gone, a casualty of the cost of maintaining multiple languages, compilers,
- and libraries in a diverse world,
- but its model for processes, tasks, and communication lives on
- in a new thread library for C.
- <DT><DT> <DD>
- Support for color displays is much more general, building on a new
- alpha-blending graphical operator called
- <TT>draw</TT>
- that replaces the old
- <TT>bitblt</TT>.
- Plan 9 screens are now, discreetly, colorful.
- <DT><DT> <DD>
- A new mechanism called plumbing connects applications together
- in a variety of ways, most obviously in the support of multimedia.
- <DT><DT> <DD>
- The interfaces to the panoply of rotating storage devices have been
- unified and extended,
- while providing better support for having Plan 9 coexist with other
- operating systems on a single disk.
- <DT><DT> <DD>
- Perhaps most important, this release of the system is being done under
- an open source agreement, providing cost-free source-level access to the
- software.
- </dl>
- <br> <br>
- Plan 9 continues to be the work of many people.
- Besides those mentioned in the old preface,
- these people deserve particular note:
- Russ Cox did much of the work updating the graphics
- and creating the new disk and bootstrap model
- as well as providing a number of new commands;
- David Hogan ported Plan 9 to the Dec Alpha;
- and
- Sape Mullender wrote the new thread library.
- <br> <br>
- Other new contributors include
- Bruce Ellis,
- Charles Forsyth,
- Eric Van Hensbergen,
- and
- Tad Hunt.
- <br> <br>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- <DL><DT><DD>
- Bell Labs
- <br>
- Computing Science Research Center
- <br>
- Murray Hill NJ
- <br>
- June, 2000
- <br> <br>
- <A href=http://www.lucent.com/copyright.html>
- Copyright</A> © 2000 Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.
- </body></html>
|
