I’m old enough to remember when Plan 9 was new, shiny, and really interesting. Rob Pike, one of Plan 9’s creators, takes advantage of his profile at The Setup to lob a few hand grenades in the direction of “cloud computing”:
A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn’t connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn’t the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we’re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.
I most enjoyed how this kicked the anthill over at Hacker News.