Hackers On Planet Earth

Nobody Owns This: 9P CyberDecks and Community-Owned Mesh Computing

Jon Sharp

This is the story of how a homebrew cyberdeck project ran headlong into a wall of modern protocol complexity, and how the 9P protocol from Bell Labs – the heart of the Plan 9 operating system – turned out to be the answer. Jon Sharp will demonstrate 9p4z, an open-source library bringing 9P to modern microcontrollers, and show working mesh chat running over long-range radio: off-grid, community-owned communication infrastructure built from parts you probably have in a drawer. The good ideas computing discarded weren’t wrong – they just weren’t profitable enough to lock up, which is exactly what makes them ours to resurrect. This talk is a direct invitation to do it yourself.

Friday 1800 Crystal Ballroom

Jon Sharp is the founder of FRST Computer, where he builds human-scale, low-power computing hardware running a Plan 9-inspired stack. Radicalized by UNIX through a career spanning network engineering, enterprise software, and embedded systems, he is constantly seeking to prove that old tech is still good tech. He is the author of 9p4z, an open-source 9P implementation for the Zephyr RTOS, and really, he’s just trying to get back to the “old ” Internet.