Plan 9 From Bell Labs - History

History

Plan 9 was a Bell Labs internal project from its start during the mid 1980s. It replaced Unix as Bell Labs's primary platform for operating systems research. It explored several changes to the original Unix model that facilitate the use and programming of the system, notably in distributed multi-user environments. In 1992, Bell Labs provided the first public release to universities, and three years later a commercial second release version became available to the general public. In the late 1990s, Lucent Technologies, having inherited Bell Labs, dropped commercial support for the project. In 2000, a non-commercial third release was distributed under an open source license. A fourth release under a new free software license occurred in 2002.

A user and development community, including current and former Bell Labs members and Massachusetts Institute of Technology personnel, continues to produce minor daily releases in form of ISO images. Bell Labs still hosts the development. The development source tree is accessible over the 9P and HTTP protocols and is used to update existing installations. In addition to the official components of the OS included in the ISOs, Bell Labs also hosts a repository of externally developed applications and tools.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs was originally developed by members of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, the same group that originally developed UNIX and C. The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis.