9fans archive / 1999 / 12 / 6 /    prev next

From: Dharani Vilwanathan dharani@luc...
Subject: [9fans] any papers on Plan9 II?
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:09:30 -0500

> Dennis Ritchie wrote:
> ...
>
> >  perhaps ultimately because it
> > seems to be hard for all but one company to make
> > money by selling an operating system.
>
> ...
>
>
> Yes. But at least they _try_ .  It was virtually impossible
> for anyone to obtain Inferno to run on real hardware, and
> the Inferno business folk made it generally unnatractive
> for third party application developers.

> It is not the OS that sells itself, but the applications available for it.
> You can have the best OS in the world, but if you do not
> make it easy for people to write apps for it, or if there
> are not enough good quality applications for it, it will die.

In my opinion, just the emu version and Limbo is good enough to
create beautiful and imaginative applications. Users could have
easily come out with excellent applications. The simplicity of
Limbo should have been a major attraction to the users but
the response and acceptance was far too low. May be the
reasons are people started using Java already and Limbo concepts
are too tough for an ordinary programmer. Rob Pike's book
could have served a lot.

Regards
dharani