Andy Kosela: One still cannot ignore the fact that Unix and Plan 9 offer two completely different approaches to displaying text. I admit I've never actually used Plan 9. Can you elaborate on the different approaches? One difference from most of what passes for UNIX these days is probably that the basic terminal model allows one to edit anything on the screen, using the mouse and keyboard and a simple button-2 menu similar to that of sam. You can edit what some program has already printed, then pick it up and send it back as input. You can even edit text in the current line that hasn't been sent yet (because you haven't hit a return yet); in effect the canonical-line part of the tty driver is in the terminal. But you probably don't mean that, both because it's not really such a radical difference, and because it doesn't conflict at all with UNIX. In fact it originated on UNIX, five or six years before Plan 9 was thought of: it's the model from the terminal program in mux, the more-advanced version of the Blit/Jerq window manager that nearly everybody used in 1127 by the time I arrived in 1984. And I still use it every day, even on Linux (and in years past on Solaris and IRIX and Digital UNIX and Ultrix). The modern version of the program to do that is called 9term. It doesn't work quite as well as I'd like on Linux due to changes in the tty driver that make it hard for a program to learn right away when tty modes are changed (in particular when echo is turned off or on), and it does conflict with the GNU readline junk because that turns off canonical processing, but to those of us who have a taste for it it's still just fine. As I say, I don't think that's the difference you mean, so please step in and supersede me. (And feel free to use my referring to something that is part of the latter-day Research editions as an excuse to continue discussing it. I think of Plan 9 as a successor to those systems anyway, and therefore related to UNIX heritage, at least as long as we're comparing and contrasting the systems.) Norman Wilson Toronto ON