These old installation images featured Erik Quanstrom's 9load, which used to support a much wider variety of hardware than the original 9load. On 2012-05-11, Geoff Collyer publicly announced new PC bootstraps, on which we were working for six months. We experienced them to support even more hardware and we chose to move to them instead.
Installation - 9legacy
Plan 9 with all 9legacy patches.
Full experimental 9legacy distribution.
Installation - 9spirit
Plan 9 with only Erik Quanstrom's ATA, AHCI and 9load patches.
For machines not supported by Plan 9 from Bell Labs, like modern AHCI controllers.
Installation - 9legacylite
9legacy without Erik Quanstrom's ATA, AHCI and 9load patches.
For machines incompatible with Erik Quanstrom's patches, like QEMU/KVM.