Google, Limbo, Inferno and Plan 9

Let’s start with a definition of these terms:

• Google is a company that named itself after a (very big) number
• Limbo is a concurrent programming language
• Inferno is a distributed operating system
• “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is a leading candidate for the worst movie ever made – and was the inspiration for the name of a research operating system called “Plan 9 from Bell Labs” (from which both Limbo and Inferno derive)

And what ties all of these things together?

Well, to start with, Google is hosting a project called “inferno-os” to get developers involved with the the Inferno operating system.

Inferno® is a distributed operating system, originally developed at Bell Labs, but now developed and maintained by Vita Nuova®. Applications written in Inferno’s concurrent programming language, Limbo, are compiled to its portable virtual machine code (Dis), to run anywhere on a network in the portable environment that Inferno provides. Unusually, that environment looks and acts like a complete operating system.

The last sentence is interesting since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google at Stanford University where another company, Sun Microsystems, was founded almost two decades earlier. Sun’s company name is derived from the initials for “Stanford University Network” and its motto is “The Network Is The Computer” -  I assume that both Larry and Sergey learned their computer skills in this highly “network-centric” culture at Stanford.

It is not unusual for Google to fund projects started by a bunch of hackers – except that in this case the original “hackers” on this project were Dennis Ritchie, who invented the C language, and Ken Thompson, who invented Unix (along with Ritchie). And since “Plan 9″ has been ongoing at Bell Labs since 1992, perhaps the code base is now stable enough to be deployed, which would justify the rumors of  “former Plan 9 engineers being on staff at Google”.

Google may be developing a GoogleOS (together with Inferno?) as part of their next business plan, if (or when) their current business model starts to falter. They have plenty of smart people, lots of money, and own one of the most powerful computing infrastrures on the planet - they have everything required to make network computing happen in a very big way.

The people at Microsoft may wake up one morning to find large portions of the Internet running as one huge (and MS unfriendly) computer – almost like it had been taken over by space aliens.