[rakoo]

Certainly horrible if we were to switch to it now, but if it had caught on, maybe we would have put more money on improving networks instead of improving CPUs.

OTOH, Plan 9 was designed as a company-global "machine": you have a room filled with CPU clusters and storage clusters, and your own simple, stupid terminal to manage your resources. But your terminal is only a view; ultimately the data lives in the storage cluster and is processed in the CPU cluster.

Take a look at this page, notably the figure 1:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9

As you can see, CPU and storage were expected to live on a high-speed, low-latency link because most of the data would fly between those two. Your terminal was expected to be anywhere else, possibly on the other end of a slow ethernet cable, and would coordinate the transmission of data from there. But most of the transmission would be between CPUs and storage. It wasn't supposed to be a truly p2p decentralized model.