i was reading up on the abilitys of this os and i hit me that it would work nicely as a way of explaining some of the abilitys of a host.

the thing was that like any unix it would list hardware as a file. but it had the ability to merge local directorys with external mounts for the same area so that you could say mount the hardware list of a external computer into the list of your local computer and from one place admin and access the combined list.

hell, even the diffrent processes running on the diffrent machines where represented by file and directory trees. or for that matter the windows on a desktop.

so basicly when a user logs in to a host what he logs into is a frontend system where the resouces of the whole network is mounted and can be accessed and controled.

then you nail a 3d gui on top of that and presto

The thing I don’t like bout that type pf setup is that traditionally hackers have been at least as likely to bypass the front end and use an exploit that takes them to a section an authorised user would never even think about.

For some reason deckers pretty much don’t do that. I think it works best unexplained, personally I don’t like the matrix as a communications medium, it works great for telepresence and entertainment but for accessing data it is woefully limiting.

Edward

well the reason i posted this was that i was struck by how similar plan9 and a host sounded when you got past the 3d ui...

Plan9 was one of the "distributed OS with MicroKernel" flock that was around in the late 80s/early 90s. The last living decendent is the bloated monstrosity that is Mac OS-X ( a MACH-3 "microkernel")

If you are interested in the stuff, look for a copy of Tanenbaums "Modern Operating Systems) or any stuff on

Plan 9 (From one of the original UNIX authors)
Mach-OS (used in NEXT, Mac)
Amobea (From Tanenbaum)
System Fünf (NOT! System 5, that's AT&T Unix[1])

While the original "Matrix" of Neuromancer "fame" was based on an AD&D Dungeon, the RPG Matrix Systems could be based on one of the above OS if the RPG authors knew about those (which I doubt)

Birdy


[1] All praise the mighty AT&T, all hail the holly pages of the SVID

birdy, im not saying that there is a direct connection.

but with the abilitys that plan9 have it or a decendant (linux and the bsds are looking into implementing some of those abilitys these days) would fit nicely as the os for running the SR3 matrix system as its currently described.

say you have the user connections all mounted under access (delete one and you should kill said users connection ), the main hardware and process list of all systems that makes up the host under control, index containing a collection of databases monitoring changes and other stuff for fast searching, files is the collective area for fileservers and slave is the place for listing all external hardware.

basicly this allows the host to scale from being one machine to being 100+ machines on a network and still the user access it as if it was a single machine. makes me kinda think of a term that sun was trowing around not to long ago about grid computing "the network is the computer". they where refering to the sharing of computing resources only tho.

so while there is not direct connection there is a kind of similarity...

*Thumbs up* Great job sliding the troll past everyone there, Birdy.

~J

i know, there is no direct link. but its kinda funny to think how similar one of the latest "generation" of cyberpunk themed computing is with the abilitys of plan9...

and on the subject of microkernels, isnt windows nt and later supposedly based on a microkernel? if so then how the hell can a display driver kill the os? from how i understand a microkernel every driver is a module and if a module fails then you just restart it while the rest of the os moves on or wait for the module to come back up.

i guess the reason is the same as with os x's "large" kernel, they moved em very close to or into the kernel itself for performance reasons. while the microkernel in theory is nice the performance can be a problem as anything in a module or further out from the kernel live in application space rather then kernel space to protect the stability of the system.

strange realy that many of the top os's out there today are based if not on code then on concepts, from the days of the big irons...

its like the dinos would show up on our collective doorstep and request the earth back

i thought that mc never got of the idea/experemetnal stage because at the time they didnt have the hardware to run it on. ie, it needed more horsepower then a normal kernel given the extra levels of data i/o needed between the kernel and the modules. and that its only now that we have the computing power to trow at it...