The new Unix rival, System Six Inc, of Golden, Colorado, believes that its Russian-designed Usix system (CI No 2,200) bears a certain resemblance to Plan 9, the distributed intended successor to Unix that Unix’s fathers Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Brian Kernighan have been working on over at AT&T Co’s Bell Laboratories for the past few years (CI No 1,473). System Six has heard Plan 9 described recently as a threads-based object-oriented microkernel. As happened with Unix, Plan 9 source code is now said to be available to universities, which seems to be the way to get a new operating system embedded into the popular psyche over time.
