Aside A

Uncover Plan 9 from outer space:

Long, long ago in a think tank far away , a group of very intelligent and creative young men decided to change the universe forever and created the UNIX operating system and its sibling, the C programming language. Now, two decades later, these same gentlemen (Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, among others) are out to repeat their success. Their latest project is a new operating system called Plan 9 (named after the worst movie in history, Plan 9 From Outer Space).Plan 9 follows the UNIX tradition of treating system devices, such as hard drives and printers, as files that can accept read and write operations (e.g./dev/lpt). Plan 9 differs from UNIX by extending this concept to its ultimate expression. In Plan 9, virtually all system resources appear to users and other applications as files. Any kind of information server (including server applications), structured in any way and in any location, can appear to be a group of ordinary files.10