Unix Pioneer Dennis Ritchie in First Major Address Since Plan 9’s Release
NEEDHAM, Mass. — January 15, 1996 — The UniForum '96 Conference and Exposition, scheduled to take place February 12-16 in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, will present Dennis Ritchie and Dave Presotto, two developers of Plan 9, at a Pre-Conference Seminar, February 13. Ritchie's appearance will mark his first major speech since the release of the breakthrough operating system from AT&T's Bell Laboratories last year.
Ritchie and Presotto will guide attendees through this next- generation operating system, designed to simplify distributed computing, by discussing how it works, how to work with it, and opportunities for implementing it.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the original developers of the Unix operating system in the late 1960s, is also the primary designer of the C language. He is head of the Computing Techniques Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
For the past decade, Dave Presotto has worked at the Bell Labs Computer Sciences Research Lab in Murray Hill, N.J. He is also editor- in-chief of the Usenix journal, Computing Systems.
Plan 9 is perhaps the first of the next-generation operating systems created with an eye to delivering on the promise of multimedia and mobile computing. Plan 9 often has been called a potential successor to Unix, although it is a completely new design intended as a system for applications developers.
The full UniForum '96 Conference, with more than 100 seminars, tutorials and panel discussions, begins Monday, February 12 and continues through Friday, February 16. The UniForum exhibit floor will be open February 14-16.
UniForum '96 is the premier industry event focusing on the growing world of open systems and advanced technologies. The corporate computing event will showcase operating environments, business solutions, applications, and development environments that use Unix and Open Technologies as their foundation. UniForum '96 runs concurrently with the ENTERPRISE COMPUTING SOLUTIONS exposition and conference, which features strategies and tools designed to enhance and implement enterprise-wide technologies.
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The following is a Backgrounder on The Plan 9 Operating System:
Plan 9 is perhaps the first of the next-generation operating systems created with an eye to delivering on the promise of multimedia and mobile computing. Such a system must support the multidimensional distributed environment that will emerge as millions of computers connect to local- and wide-area networks.
The software, incidentally, takes it name from "Plan 9 From Outer Space," a sci-fi cult classic by director Ed Wood.
"This has significant implications for desktop PCs hooked up, for example, via network connections to the Internet," writes Alexander Wolfe in Electronic Engineering Times. "It means that a PC equipped with Plan 9 can view remote files on the network as if they were local files residing on the desktop system" — making it easier to get at information rapidly.
Plan 9 often has been called a potential successor to Unix, although it is a completely new design intended as a system for applications developers. Part of the goal was to bind together a network of personal workstations with the seamless integration found in old timesharing systems. But here, cheap microcomputers would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources. Those resources include, for example, computing servers (which provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways), and file servers (which store permanent data). Most significant is the ability to allow applications to be divided into pieces for efficient execution on different processors.
Among the features of Plan 9: it is constructed to handle high-speed transfer of files across networks. And, it's designed to allow multiple types of data — such as voice, video, e-mail and fax — to be rapidly processed and transferred.
The system was built to run on a variety of microprocessors, including Intel, Motorola, Sun Sparc, MIPS and AT&T Hobbit architectures. In addition, it can run on PCs with as little as 2 MB of memory. Plan 9 is written in C.
The first commercial product to use Plan 9 is a set-top box for TV, developed by AT&T. An embedded RISC processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. runs Plan 9, providing a small, powerful distributed operating system for the box. The box handles modem and voice-compression functions, digital voice messages, downloading of software via network, and graphics display — from at-home banking to a listing of phone callers — on a TV screen.
The following is a Backgrounder on Plan 9's Dennis Ritchie and Dave Presotto:
Dennis M. Ritchie is head of the Computing Techniques Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1968 after obtaining his graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard University. He assisted Ken Thompson in creating the Unix operating system, and is the primary designer of the C language, in which Unix, as well as many other systems, are written. He continues to work in operating systems and languages.
He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, is a Bell Laboratories Fellow, and has received several honors, including the ACM Turing award, the IEEE Piore, Hamming and Pioneer awards, and the NEC C&C Foundation award.
Dave Presotto joined Bell Labs computer sciences research lab in Murray Hill, N.J., home of Unix and Plan 9, in the early 1980s. His research revolves around the gooey (not GUI) parts of systems that have no correct/good solutions; e-mail, networking, security, administration, as well as electronic commerce. He is also editor-in-chief of the Usenix journal, Computing Systems.
He graduated from MIT in 1976 with B.S.'s in Physics and EECS. While at MIT he worked in compiler development at Data General. He spent two years "bumming around" Europe as a Digital Equipment Corporation software support specialist, where he diagnosed the failure of the billing system of Portugal's international long distance system: it was upstairs from a laundry and all the moving parts in the tape drives had rusted and jammed due to the steam. He received an M.S. in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1980 joined Bell Labs in Indian Hill to work on the performance of the DMERT operating system and the #5 electronic switching system. Realizing his mistake, he returned to Berkeley, played lots of volleyball, and in 1983 was awarded a Ph.D.
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