Post by Matthew Veetyhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397390
For what it's worth, our beloved operating system is on Hacker News.
The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix®
users but at the same time quite foreign, because it indeed is not a Unix.
9P2000 (aka 9P) is a network protocol developed at Bell Labs for the
Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of
accessing and manipulating resources and applications transparently in a
distributed environment. 9P works both as a distributed file system and
as a network transparent and language agnostic 'API'.
Though Plan 9 does not have office productivity suites, relational
databases, and, or even a decent web browser like Chromium, or Firefox,
modren C++ compiler, good GUI tool-kit or widgets and essential drivers
for AHCI, Bluetooth, WiFi, WiMAX and USB devices and a fully fuctional
IPv6 networking as yet, but it certainly is an example of a clean,
efficient, compact and monolithic kernel and distributed operating
system environment which provides a native light weight window system
rio, shell rc, text editor sam and versatile tools like acme, a user
interface, plumber, a mechanism for interprocess communication and acid,
a scriptable debugger for programmers, all in very small footprint.
--
Balwinder S "bdheeman" Dheeman
(http://werc.homelinux.net/contact/)