Tim Newsham wrote:
or the cannonical example, a hard drive.
I intentionally avoided this one because two things that modern
OSs do know how to share (at least a little) are:
- filesystems
- printers
Its just all the other stuff that they haven bothered to tackle
yet, except in very specific applications (ie. remote desktop access).
- erik
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com
Actually, they have ...
'Big iron' quite aside [1], it was common (at least) as far back as CP/M 2.X to
share peripherals such as prom-blasters, text-to-speech gear, terminals, serial
and parallel ports across multiple machines. Not everything needed was in the
as-shipped 'OS', but it was not hard to code the rest.
By the time Netware, IBM OS/2 (and perhaps Win-?? - not my area of expertise)
came along it was tick-the-box easier to share, for example, a modem or scanner,
just as easily as a printer or storage device. IOW - streaming 'near real time'
devices as well as spooled or (actual) file-based services.
Plan9 didn't 'invent' any of this.
Plan9 just prioritized it and provided a more appropriate infrastructure and
toolset to make for easier and more ubiquitous use of it all.
That one or more folks are now seeing a need to reinvent that particular set of
wheels is curious, as it never actually went away - Plan9 or otherwise.
Perhaps the old saw about 'ethnics' (pick yer own favorite..) and garbage.
"We never actually throw anything away, we just kick it from place to place
until its gets lost."
Bill
[1] AN/FSQ-7 and AN/GSA-51, could of course 'share' their resources - or at lest
take-over, one from another. But that sort of thing has been MIL-SPEC since
about 8,000 years before a certain French Colonel of Dragoons gave up his
military career to lay the groundwork for the Plan9 user interface.
