Plan 9 is an operating system created at Bell Labs as a successor to UNIX. It uses a new file system called 9P for inter-process communication and was developed by Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike, and others. This document discusses Plan 9, its history and technologies including 9P, processes, and UTF-8 support. It also covers related projects including the Pegasus web server, the Rit scripting language, and provides references for further information.