Inferno: la commedia interattiva
Robert Neil Pike, Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, Dave Presotto, Dennis M. Ritchie, Howard W. Trickey · USENIX Annual Technical Conference · 1997
As telecommunications, entertainment, and computing networks merge, a wide variety of services will be offered on a diverse array of hardware, software, and networks. Inferno provides a uniform execution environment for applications and services in this chaotic world. Inferno comprises a distributed, networked operating system; a virtual machine; a programming language; naming, access, and security protocols; and so on. Above these, it provides standard interfaces to access networks, graphical toolkits, and other system features. These standard interfaces, coupled with the architecture-independent virtual machine, an operating system that can run on bare hardware or as user processes above a commercial operating system, and the ability for Inferno programs to adapt themselves dynamically to the current environment, offer an unprecedented level of portability for applications and services.