I haven't touched Oberon since the 90s. But it was a fun little system.
The language is one of the nicer Pascal descendents. The windowing system was similar to tiling. The entire system was tiny in terms of code. Everything was black and white.
One of the nicest features was universally embeddable widgets. You could make a simple clock and embed it in running text, for example. Kind of like what OpenDoc dreamed of, or Google Wave's inline widgets, or what it might be like if you could extend Discord with custom UI in a few hundred lines of code.
I wasn't motivated to keep using Oberon—it was honestly too odd and too small to compete with my other desktop options.
But I do agree it would be neat to try with an eInk display. It's a small, interesting, black-and-white system with a minimalist UI. Particularly if you customized the UI input layer, it could be a neat tool for building small household dashboards.
The language is one of the nicer Pascal descendents. The windowing system was similar to tiling. The entire system was tiny in terms of code. Everything was black and white.
One of the nicest features was universally embeddable widgets. You could make a simple clock and embed it in running text, for example. Kind of like what OpenDoc dreamed of, or Google Wave's inline widgets, or what it might be like if you could extend Discord with custom UI in a few hundred lines of code.
I wasn't motivated to keep using Oberon—it was honestly too odd and too small to compete with my other desktop options.
But I do agree it would be neat to try with an eInk display. It's a small, interesting, black-and-white system with a minimalist UI. Particularly if you customized the UI input layer, it could be a neat tool for building small household dashboards.