[f2f]

you're being deliberately obtuse. the uniformity in plan9 didn't mean everything spoke the same protocol, but that every resource could be shared everywhere. you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine. indeed on any other network that gave you could login to. that is the part that's sorely missed.

[lomnakkus]

> you're being deliberately obtuse.

To me it sounds like codemac is being entirely sensible and pragmatic about what the limitations are. Pervasive "piping of bytes" is all well and good, but if you don't understand what the bytes mean, it doesn't really matter.

> you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine

Office network? Sure. Not try it over a WAN and suddenly it doesn't look so hot.

The thing is that once you're going over the network you really need to start thinking about the effects of latency and how to compensate for it or hide it. Network transparency is a foe in this (very common) scenario.

[codemac]

If I can get the damned TV onto the network at all, then I can use 9fs or any other protocol including http.

plan9 did not invent the network, or even the concept of shared resources. They focused on putting all resources into a filesystem API, entirely and exclusively. That's their innovation. I'm not being obtuse by pointing it out.

[f2f]

i'm not entirely sure about your timeline. plan9 came about in 1990. plenty of "sharing" back then was the unique property of distributed systems like amoeba.