Explore the Uncharted Frontier
Build the Future with Plan 9
Come learn Plan 9 with us and help us build the future of operating systems.
For the last thirty years, the computer landscape has been dominated by UNIX-like clones. But all that is about to change for the free software community thanks to Plan 9.
Help Change Computing Forever
Plan 9 was created by the original UNIX team from Bell Labs, the same all-star team that invented Unix and the C language. Its contributors included Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Bjarne Stroustrup.
Plan 9 Innovations
Plan 9 follows the UNIX philosophy more than UNIX itself:
- It takes the simple idea that every interface should be a file and extends that to everything: the keyboard, mouse, sound card, windowing system, and network resources.
- It creates a unique name space for each process so that each process sees a unique file system.
Plan 9 is a distributed services operating system designed with the global internet in mind. Its elegant design will make it possible to easily set up clusters and grids of servers in a way never before possible with Unix-like clones.
Watch a Live Demo
Join us at IRCNow to learn more about the design:
- Network services using protocols like ssh, ftp, and email simply appear as files on your filesystem. This removes the need for special client interfaces.
- A new windowing system that is completely integrated with the system, with its own file interface, that is independent and easier to code for than X11 and Wayland.
- Chroots have been replaced with unique per-process namespacing
- Berkeley sockets and ioctls have been replaced with /net file system
Free 9rc Account
IRCNow is offering a free 9rc account. We want to train explorers so we can write our own free and open operating system.
Join us to make a lasting impact on technology, to work on a project that will influence free software operating systems for the next twenty years. Let's work on Plan 9 development!
Plan 9 Innovations Adopted by Linux
- UTF-8 was first invented in Plan 9!
- procfs was first invented in Plan 9!
- Union filesystems were first invented in Plan 9!