I was poking around today, and happened to run into a very interesting operating system, Plan 9 from Bell Labs. I quote from the Wikipedia article:

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used as a research vehicle. It was developed as the research successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 is most notable for representing all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user-interface, through the filesystem rather than specialized interfaces.

This is fascinating. The entire OS treats everything as files, even things that you normally wouldn’t consider as files, such as processes and application windows. It’s a shame that it never caught on with the mainstream. Author Eric S. Raymond has his thoughts on why:

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

I really wish that I had a computer to try out this OS on. My desktop needs to be running on all the time as a server, and the VMware image I’ve tried to use to run it has display problems (the drivers from the live cd don’t seem to work with the emulated display, and everything looks garbled). When I have a chance, however, I’ll give it a shot and see what damage I can do.