There's a whole category of utopian developer environments and languages with far bigger aspirations than they were able to achieve but that still influenced others. Smalltalk being another example.

One of my favorite things about the old C2 Wards Wiki is that it's like an archaeological site where time is frozen in this period and you can browse through preserved arguments about how Smalltalk and Extreme Programming will take over the world.

And they did, in the usual half-a**ed, broken, honoured-more-in-the-breach-than-the-observance way such ideas usually get mass adopted.

I keep hearing about it and its influence, but I can't really figure out if it's active or dead or even If I can use it on a virtual machine or so. 9p.io doesn't seem to even load on my machine

Since 2000 Plan9 has been open source. Official website: https://p9f.org/

You can also try out a derivative like Inferno: https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

An update was released just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485309 N.b. practically plan9 has become 9front.

9front was just on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485309