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<html> <title> preface3 </title> <body BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#330088" ALINK="#FF0044"> <H1>Preface to the Third (2000) Edition </H1> <br> <br> A great deal has happened to Plan 9 in the five years since its last release. Although much of the system will seem familiar, hardly any aspect of it is unchanged. The kernel has been heavily reworked; the graphical environment completely rewritten; many commands added, deleted, or replaced; and the libraries greatly expanded. Underneath, though, the same approach to computing remains: a distributed system that uses file-like naming to access and control resources both local and remote. <br> <br> Some of the changes are sweeping: <DL> <DT><DT> <DD> Alef is gone, a casualty of the cost of maintaining multiple languages, compilers, and libraries in a diverse world, but its model for processes, tasks, and communication lives on in a new thread library for C. <DT><DT> <DD> Support for color displays is much more general, building on a new alpha-blending graphical operator called <TT>draw</TT> that replaces the old <TT>bitblt</TT>. Plan 9 screens are now, discreetly, colorful. <DT><DT> <DD> A new mechanism called plumbing connects applications together in a variety of ways, most obviously in the support of multimedia. <DT><DT> <DD> The interfaces to the panoply of rotating storage devices have been unified and extended, while providing better support for having Plan 9 coexist with other operating systems on a single disk. <DT><DT> <DD> Perhaps most important, this release of the system is being done under an open source agreement, providing cost-free source-level access to the software. </dl> <br> <br> Plan 9 continues to be the work of many people. Besides those mentioned in the old preface, these people deserve particular note: Russ Cox did much of the work updating the graphics and creating the new disk and bootstrap model as well as providing a number of new commands; David Hogan ported Plan 9 to the Dec Alpha; and Sape Mullender wrote the new thread library. <br> <br> Other new contributors include Bruce Ellis, Charles Forsyth, Eric Van Hensbergen, and Tad Hunt. <br> <br> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> <DL><DT><DD> Bell Labs <br> Computing Science Research Center <br> Murray Hill NJ <br> June, 2000 <br> <br> <A href=http://www.lucent.com/copyright.html> Copyright</A> © 2000 Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. </body></html>