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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

What Rob wants is a personal computing environment that isn't restricted to a singular personal computer. I use plan 9 and the concept of your ENTIRE computing environment being portable across any number of machines, at the OS level, is priceless.

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Which was actually the computing environment of the early 1980s, at places like PARC, MIT (Athena), CMU (don’t remember the name of their system) as well as commercial systems like Apollo. None of which he ever mentions when touting Plan 9.

After 15 years of computing I was shocked when I realized that Sun machines kept all their data locally, ran sendmail etc. It seemed like such a huge step backwards in time.

> CMU (don’t remember the name of their system)

Andrew [1], not sure it was usable in 1984 though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project

Our research group used Apollo's for several years and the feeling that they were all one big system (which never failed) was wonderful. Not being pure Unix was the main drawback.

Would you be so kind to elaborate on this? "I use plan 9"

You use it for your daily work? Is this possible?

Hobby use. Though I do have a little nuc at work running 9front to write small bits of automation (IEC 61131-3, ST) and a Basic dialect of CNC RS-274 G code in acme and a little Sam here and there. I'm slowly learning it. I also write a little c code as the plan 9 c library and tooling is really nice. And I love the concurrency library, thread(2). I access the little server via drawterm from both a Linux machine and a Windows 10 machine. I can sit at either computer and have access to the same user files, configuration, etc. And drawterm gives the plan 9 session access to the host (terminal in this case) resources including the TCP stack (you can do really cool routing and tunneling tricks with this method)

I highly recommend giving it a look (I highly recommend 9front), and read nemo's intro.

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