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