History
From the late 1990s I was enamoured by operating systems from Bell Labs including Unix, Plan 9, and Inferno OS. From 2004 I hosted a blog about Inferno OS called the Inferno Programmer’s Notebook. I stopped working on Inferno OS around 2012. Most developers in the community moved over to the Go language around that time. However, since 2022 I haved worked on Inferno OS again, porting it to the Raspberry Pi Pico, porting the JIT compilers to 64 bit platforms, and building compute clusters. Check out the repositories below. Inferno OS is now considered “retro”; a relic from the 1990s and the last OS from the Bell Labs Unix room. I still enjoy it because I can self-host a flexible system. I like the Limbo programming language for its parsimony and I believe interesting opportunities still await such a small, elegant OS.
Blog
Repositories
- Inferno Lab. Source code for all the prototype software made in the Inferno operating system over a number of years. Much of it is written in the Limbo programming language, a precursor to Go. It had excellent support for communicating sequential processes much like Go.
- Acme SAC. The Acme editor was developed by Rob Pike for the Plan 9 operating system. It was ported to Inferno OS by VitaNuova. Made into a “standalone” editor for Windows and other operating systems by packaging and customizing the editor and Inferno OS. The original Acme editor is part of Plan 9 from user space port to Unix like systems and I recommend you use that version.
- Docker Images. Docker images for Inferno and Acme-SAC.
- Inferno OS on Raspberry Pi Pico. Inferno OS ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico using the GCC toolchain and PICO SDK.
- Inferno64. A port of inferno OS to 64 bit platforms amd64 and arm64 with JIT compilers.