Vita Nuova First to Distribute Plan 9 Operating System in a Box.

Business/Technology Editors

MONTCLAIR, N.J. & YORK, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 10, 2000

Users Worldwide Can Now Receive the Open Source CD, Manuals and E-mail

Support, Starting a New Era of Distributed Application Development

Vita Nuova(R), a network operating systems company specializing in technologies for distributed application development, announced today that it is the first and only distributor of Plan 9 in a box.

Plan 9 is the first operating system designed from the outset for production-quality distributed computing in a networked environment. It was developed by Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, which also had created the UNIX(a) system and the C and C++ programming languages.

The newly packaged software, formerly only available by download, represents the third version of Plan 9, which includes numerous enhancements, many of which were inspired by the user community. Customers can order the Plan 9 software as an Open Source CD singly or as a package that includes the CD and user manuals. Vita Nuova is also offering user support via e-mail and will fix bugs and provide enhancements.

Plan 9 is the second networked operating system in Vita Nuova's portfolio. The company also recently announced the exclusive global rights to develop and market Inferno, an operating system particularly suitable for use in resource constrained networked devices and a variety of other embedded applications.

"Vita Nuova is addressing the exploding market for distributed applications," said Michael Jeffrey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vita Nuova. "Because Plan 9 and Inferno don't carry the baggage of legacy systems, they are able to move quickly to meet the constantly evolving needs of the computing world. As a result, these two operating systems are attracting a vibrant global development community that we expect will continue to grow significantly with the physical release of Plan 9."

In other news, Vita Nuova announced today that it is opening an office in Montclair, N.J., in order to distribute product from both the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as further penetrate the U.S. market, in which about one-half of Vita Nuova's current customers reside.

"Plan 9 was conceived as an environment for distributed application development," said Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of the UNIX system and creator of the C programming language, as well as head of the System Software Research Department at Bell Labs. "We looked at the feasibility of evolving UNIX, but it seemed better to start afresh. Plan 9 brings a simplicity and elegance to distributed computing not seen in other technologies."

Plan 9 uses a single protocol to refer to and communicate with processes, programs and data, making it highly suited for building large, distributed systems containing a number of file servers, CPU servers and other distributed components. It is designed around the basic principle that all resources appear as files in a hierarchical file system. These resources are accessed via a network-level protocol called 9P, which hides the exact location of services from the user. All servers provide their services as an exported hierarchy of files.

Plan 9 has remote booting capabilities, which makes it very easy to use PCs as fully featured Plan 9 user terminals. It has been ported to a number of architectures, including Intel x86, SPARC, Alpha, Power PC, and Arm.

Enhancements in the new release of Plan 9 include a revised kernel that resolves ambiguities in file names, an improved graphics environment, an updated command set, expanded libraries and "plumbing." The latter enables the user to pass messages between active applications.

Other Plan 9 Features

-- The dump file system, which makes a daily "snapshot" of the filestore
available to users

-- Unicode character set support throughout the system

-- Advanced kernel synchronization facilities for parallel processing

-- ANSI/POSIX environment emulator (APE)

-- Acme - an editor, shell and window system for programmers

-- Sam - a screen editor with structural regular expressions

-- Support for MIME mail messages and IMAP4

To the end user, Plan 9 bears a superficial resemblance to UNIX, but the underlying operating system is very different. In particular, Plan 9 was designed as a network operating system, as opposed to UNIX, for which networking support was added as an afterthought. Some of the standard UNIX tools are available, but they have generally been either enhanced or completely rewritten.

Pricing and Availability

Plan 9 is available now and can be ordered from the Vita Nuova Web site. Pricing is $25 for the CD, $75 for the manual set and $100 for the boxed set. Additionally, Plan 9 is available for download from the Bell Labs Web site under an open-source agreement at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/.

About Vita Nuova

Founded March 1, 2000, Vita Nuova (www.vitanuova.com) is an operating systems company specializing in technologies for distributed application development on network devices. Vita Nuova has obtained the exclusive global rights to the Inferno Operating System from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and is the first and only distributor of Plan 9 in a box. Vita Nuova is building a broad user base for Inferno and Plan 9, as well as revenue streams from subscriptions, technical services & support and vertical market applications. A privately held company, Vita Nuova is headquartered in York, U.K., with offices in New Jersey, U.S., and can be reached by calling 011 44 1904 435171 (in the U.K.), 1 866 TEL VITA (in the U.S.), or via e-mail at [e-mail].

(a) UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group.