The initial Oberon OS is indeed from 1987, but there are many Oberons. The original Oberon GUI was the everything-is-executable-text one, not the ZUI.
The ZUI was part of Thomas M. Frey's work for his dissertation "Bluebottle : A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI Framework for Active Oberon" [2] (Bluebottle OS) submitted in 2005.
This was built on top of Pieter J. Muller's work for his dissertation "The Active Object System" [1] (AOS) submitted in 2002.
There are many more ETH (PhD and student) projects based on Oberon before and after (ARM Oberon, WinOberon, UnixOberon, Oberon.NET, ...) mainly in Jürg Gutknecht's group.
Thanks, this is really helpful!
Since there seems to be no central point of information on the myriad versions of oberon and no official website at eth anymore, it's really hard to get the lay of the land and find out which version does what and why.
...and A2 was perfectly positioned to be used as a smartphone OS instead of Android (2007)- compiled modules with GC, multithreaded ZUI etc in 2005. It's a shame really but I guess developer familiarity trumps architecture:(
The ZUI was part of Thomas M. Frey's work for his dissertation "Bluebottle : A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI Framework for Active Oberon" [2] (Bluebottle OS) submitted in 2005.
This was built on top of Pieter J. Muller's work for his dissertation "The Active Object System" [1] (AOS) submitted in 2002.
There are many more ETH (PhD and student) projects based on Oberon before and after (ARM Oberon, WinOberon, UnixOberon, Oberon.NET, ...) mainly in Jürg Gutknecht's group.
[1] https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/... [2] https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...