[drablyechoes]

A lot of concepts that originated in plan 9 have been widely adopted by modern unix-like operating systems, most notably the /proc file system, so in a certain sense I would say that it was a successful project.

Lack of applications, drivers and compelling use cases ultimately caused the project itself to fail. It was also competing against operating systems with huge commercial backing that already had deeply entrenched market share.

[wahern]

procfs predates Plan 9: http://lucasvr.gobolinux.org/etc/Killian84-Procfs-USENIX.pdf

[mennis]

Meh. That is research from the same group that was thinking about the problems with Unix and could be argued is an early expression of some of the ideas that became plan9. Seems a little like saying Linux predates Linux since the terminal code that Linus based his first release on existed before he trashed his FS.