Christophe

🚦Engineer #science #litterature #art #nature #plan9 #unix #gopher 🌳📚💻
Personal profile, views are my own.

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

The guys who built Unix hated Unix.

So Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Rob Pike spent a decade building its replacement at Bell Labs. They called it Plan 9. Named after a 1957 Z-grade sci-fi movie as an inside joke.

They released it for free in 2000. Anyone could use it. Anyone could change it. Anyone could run it.

What it introduced that the world was not ready for:

- Everything is a file. Networks, devices, processes, window systems. All one unified namespace.
- Every user gets their own private view of the entire system. Not shared. Yours alone.
- Distributed computing was not a feature. It was the entire foundation.
- UTF-8, the encoding standard the whole internet runs on today, was born here.
- The networking model inside Linux, Android and modern containers traces directly back to Plan 9.
- Rob Pike took these ideas and used them to design Go, now the language powering cloud infrastructure worldwide.

Windows costs $139. macOS locks you into Apple hardware. Linux carries 50 years of Unix decisions nobody can undo.

Plan 9 costs nothing. Runs anywhere. And its ideas already live inside every OS you have ever touched.

The world ignored Plan 9.

Then stole everything from it.

Ken Thompson never got the credit. Neither did Plan 9.

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@ns123abc AND ?

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@CeJour_Histoire Oui maintes fois... Dans le tuyaux c'est de l'eau salé pas du sel liquide. Le sel se liquéfie à 801 °C. L'eau salée était d'abord concentrée par évaporation naturelle dans un bâtiment dit des graduations aujourd'hui disparu, avant d'être traitée dans la saline.

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@SergeZaka 👍

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@riko_schraf @occitel 👍

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

Bell Labs built an operating system so weird
it could run inside another operating system. 🤯

> They called it Inferno OS.

> Built in 1995 at Bell Labs.
> The same lab that created Unix, C, and the transistor.
> Designed around one crazy idea: “everything is a file.”
> Networks acted like files.
> Hardware acted like files.
> Even running programs looked like files.
> One simple system controlling everything.
> Could boot as its own OS.
> Or run inside Windows and Linux like a normal app.
> Same software worked everywhere unchanged.
> No recompiling. No platform headaches.
> Bell Labs pushed it against Java in the 90s.
> But Inferno went further than Java ever did.
> It made the entire operating system portable.
> Ran comfortably on just 1MB RAM.
> Built for TVs, routers, and embedded systems.
> Long before IoT became mainstream.
> Never became popular despite being years ahead.
> Open sourced in 2021 for anyone to explore today.

Most operating systems chased popularity.
Inferno chased ideas that were too early for the world.

One of computing’s most underrated projects ever. 🔥

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@vibeonX69 + xargs -P

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@AlfinCodes none of them...

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@systemdesignone Go

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@UnixToolTip The field separator can be a character or a regular expression => makes awk a powerfull tool

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@ITConnect_fr Du moment que j'ai un terminal et un navigateur web, ça me va...

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@piyush784066 Debian for servers

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@igor_os777 So powerfull :
• pattern/action mechanism
• record separator (a new line or any character)
• field separator (a character or a regular expression)
• can use any cmds from the OS.

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@babgi Bon début. Mais à l'heure du "nuage", est qu'on aurait pas besoin de terminaux "web" avec un OS minimal dédié sur un matériel dédié aussi (on ferait des économies). La suite numérique DINUM c'est du web...

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@MathGuyTFL r²+r=6r => r²=5r => r=5

[Pavel Klinkovský @Stremhlav]

Chemnitz Linux Days 2026 will start tomorrow… 😉

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@UnixToolTip A ∪ B : sort -u A B
A ∩ B : sort A B | uniq -d
A \ B : sort B B A | uniq -u
B \ A : sort A A B | uniq -u
A X B : join -a 1 -a 2 -j 999 <(sort A) <(sort B)

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@vivoplt DuckDB

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@justbyte_ cd /sys
cd /src
cd /usr/src
and look

[Christophe @cd9tw]

@straceX Great...
Constraints => smart solutions