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.FP lucidasans .nr PS -1 .nr VS -1 .TL Preface .SP 0.4i exactly .LP Inferno benefits from the results of many years of systems research at the Computing Science Research Center at Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs. The system is clearly a cultural descendent of the earliest Unix systems, and amongst Inferno's inventors, listed below, are several venerable programmers associated with the development of Unix. Inferno looks out on a very different world from Unix: complexity is no longer confined to large mainframes, but has sprawled across world wide networks, trapping programmers in its web. .LP Inferno tackles this as radically now as Unix did then. First, it adopts key ideas from the system Plan 9, also from Bell Labs: .IP \(bu Replace a plethora of protocols by a simple, unifying file service protocol (Styx), that can be served even by tiny devices, giving a uniform way to access objects throughout the network. .IP \(bu Let applications `compute a name space': all resources are represented as file systems, which an application assembles into an application-specific hierarchy or `name space', private or shared, that hides their source (local or remote) and nature (static or dynamic), for completely transparent access. .IP \(bu Using those primitives, implement windowing systems, networked graphics, remote debugging, device control, and much more, with remarkable ease and great simplicity. .LP Inferno carries Plan 9's ideas further. Plan 9 virtualised resources; Inferno virtualises the whole system. The operating system kernel can run both native and `hosted' on a range of platforms presenting identical interfaces on all, offering wider portability. The Limbo programming language offers proper concurrent programming, and straightforward yet dynamic modularity. The Dis virtual machine allows applications to cross architecture boundaries invisibly during execution. Inferno shows the `continued appliance of computer science'. .LP The original development team at Bell Labs was Sean Dorward, Rob Pike and Phil Winterbottom, with Eric Grosse, Jim McKie, Dave Presotto, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Howard Trickey. Many others have contributed much since then, both within Lucent and without. .LP Inferno® is now a supported, commercial product of Vita Nuova. The Third Edition of the Programmer's manual marked that event. The Fourth Edition brings many changes in content, but also makes the full source available as Free Software under a new `dual licence' scheme. .LP .sp .in 4i .nf .ft I .ce 100 Dave Atkin John Bates Danny Byrne John Firth Charles Forsyth Michael Jeffrey Chris Locke Roger Peppé Nigel Roles .sp Vita Nuova .br June 2003 .ce 0 .in -4i