Plan 9 From Bell Labs and The Console Message Processor

October 02, 2024

I went for a walk and talked about some things I've been thinking about today.

This was about BBC Basic, C Compilers and the Feertech MicroBeast. See Taylor and Amy Build The Feertech MicroBeast for a link to Dr Volker Berthelmann's Compilers page.

See this ABug Zoom talk by Richard Russell on BBC Basic SDL:

See https://github.com/rtrussell/BBCSDL.

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Then I remembered to talk about Plan 9 From Bell Labs: Nerdearla - Entrevista con Ken Thompson.

Then I remembered something I had thought about in Cochabamba, and now I realise that it actually handles the problem of partitioning sharing permissions quite nicely. The idea is that you share stuff by constructing fixpoints which allows you to flexibly manage those intersectional unions that we talked about in the comments to the Radical Networks video Speculative Network Topologies: Modeling Futurity which still has only 148 views. Why?

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Then I remembered my one-dimensional fractal movie on the Pi Pico LED:

Then I saw some boats in the dark:

The idea I had was about sharing data across plan 9 work-spaces by sharing parts of your desktop with others. So I am working on several projects and there are separate regions on my desktop where I have all the relevant documents, viewers, terminals and editors etc. already open there. This is kind of permanent, so when I log out and log in somewhere else, then these same spaces are there as well. Amongst these documents there are regions of the work-spaces of other people, all in their appropriate Plan 9 namespaces. Of course some of those regions are actually regions of my own desktop, so this is a graph, rather than a hierarchy of spaces. It seems to me that within this network there would be some kinds of fixpoints which partitioned my workspace in a fairly natural way, according to the connections made by others who are doing related work (otherwise they would not be sharing my workspace). This is strongly reminiscent of the type system that Robin Milner outlined in his tutorial review for the higher-order polyadic Pi Calculus, and I wonder if there is some sort of model of it in, say, Norman Wildberger's Box Arithmetic.