It is a complete single user graphical workstation OS, written in a GC enabled systems programming language.
Niklaus Wirth got his inspiration out of Mesa/Cedar during his second sabbatical at Xerox PARC (during his first one he ended up creating Modula-2 inspired by Mesa).
You can see what Mesa/Cedar was capable of by checking this videos,
The original Oberon system was a simplified version of it in more affordable hardware, then from its roots, a series of other variants were born, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, V4, System 3, Component Pascal, Zonnon, are the most well known. Eventually Niklaus Wirth decided to go back and see how much he could remove from original Oberon and still have it be a systems programming language with GC, thus Oberon-07 was born, with a couple of revisions, the latest one from 2016.
Going back to the original one, this is what you got in the package:
- A full stack single user graphical workstation, in a GC enabled systems programming language
- The only kind of application are modules, loaded dynamically
- Applications are just modules that register themselves into the system to be available on the REPL or in menus when loaded, e.g. Module.Command will load Module and call the procedure named Command, which can then be fed data from the REPL, mouse selection or selected application window
- This brings dynamism similar to Smalltalk and Lisp machines where you get access to whole OS and each application is extensible
At a given point during the 90's the ETHZ IT department had plenty of people using Oberon based workstations.
With a view to a portable environment, I was thinking earlier today that it would be nice to have a second, all-in-one application to use over different OS environments, to complement a modern browser. Something with a file explorer, editor, support for scripts -- and possibly extensions. It appears non-native Oberon could be a fit to that; the lack of an up-to-date browser would not be a weakness.
It is a complete single user graphical workstation OS, written in a GC enabled systems programming language.
Niklaus Wirth got his inspiration out of Mesa/Cedar during his second sabbatical at Xerox PARC (during his first one he ended up creating Modula-2 inspired by Mesa).
You can see what Mesa/Cedar was capable of by checking this videos,
"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
The original Oberon system was a simplified version of it in more affordable hardware, then from its roots, a series of other variants were born, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, V4, System 3, Component Pascal, Zonnon, are the most well known. Eventually Niklaus Wirth decided to go back and see how much he could remove from original Oberon and still have it be a systems programming language with GC, thus Oberon-07 was born, with a couple of revisions, the latest one from 2016.
Going back to the original one, this is what you got in the package:
- A full stack single user graphical workstation, in a GC enabled systems programming language
- The only kind of application are modules, loaded dynamically
- Applications are just modules that register themselves into the system to be available on the REPL or in menus when loaded, e.g. Module.Command will load Module and call the procedure named Command, which can then be fed data from the REPL, mouse selection or selected application window
- This brings dynamism similar to Smalltalk and Lisp machines where you get access to whole OS and each application is extensible
At a given point during the 90's the ETHZ IT department had plenty of people using Oberon based workstations.
For a couple of screenshots about Oberon System 3 and Active Oberon, with links about Xerox PARC related stuff have a look at https://www.progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon§ion=co...