CS Lunch Monday, November 28
Talk with a research scientist, Vic Zandy from IDA/CCS
After his talk at 11:30, Vic will meet with students and
faculty to talk about his work as a CS Research Scientist.
Vic is a researcher at the IDA Center for Computing Sciences.
Prior to that, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell
Laboratories where he worked on the Plan 9 operating system.
The CS department will provide pizza this week.
Talk at 11:30 in the CS Lab:
"
An Introduction to Plan 9
"
The Plan 9 operating system was created in the same lab
as Unix by many of the same people. It departs from
Unix by making networking, access to remote resources,
and graphics the central features of the system.
Almost all resources in Plan 9 look like files. Remote
resources, regardless of their function, speak a
common, simple protocol based on familiar file-like
naming and access methods. Per-process name spaces
enable programs and users to customize a private
collection of local and remote resources of interest.
Naming conventions make decisions about the location of
resources transparent to programs. Traditional
applications, including shells, windows, and editors,
have been recast in this structure with new ideas for
interactive usability and aesthetics. The result looks
like Unix at first but gradually leads to new ways of
thinking about the design and use of distributed
systems.
In this talk I'll introduce and give examples of the
main ideas of Plan 9, and discuss the influence of
these ideas in other operating systems.