

The TTY demystified - surki
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php

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skwiddor
<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/>

They got rid of the TTY, huzzah!

~~~
cturner
Given how utterly cool plan9 is, I have some difficulty understanding how they
so completely failed to find a userbase. I sometimes have wishful thinking
that maybe google or someone like that is secretly running on plan 9 and that
in time it will permeate out. But I think not. Anyway - not too important -
the OS layer is becoming irrelevant (and yet when my parents asked what on
earth I could want for my 30th I asked for a book on ncurses :) ).

~~~
amix
I don't think things win market share by how cool or powerful they are - e.g.
Betamax vs. VHS OR SPARC vs. x86 OR Haskell vs. C. Why something becomes
popular has to do a lot with timing, price and creating something that's "good
enough".

Other than this, plan9 is/was really cool and has a lot of interesting
concepts (like a distributed architecture).

~~~
yummyfajitas
Minor nit: Betamax is a standard, but flawed example. The original betamax
cassettes only worked for 1 hour, but movies last 1.5-2.5 hours. They
eventually fixed it (at the cost of lowering quality), but too late.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax#Criticism>

~~~
skwiddor
And it's another example of a win not being necessarily what yo hoped for. Ok,
Sony didn't get a Beta machine into every home as they had hoped, but they got
at least one into every TV station.

