
Oberon Workstation on the Mac App Store - MaysonL
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oberon-workstation/id1057155516
======
pjmlp
Nice idea to bring Oberon back to life.

Although I am a little sad to see this is based on the Original Oberon, and
not on System 3 with its Gadgets framework:

[http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/WebScreen.html](http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/native/WebScreen.html)

[http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/eve/Leonardo.png](http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/eve/Leonardo.png)

[http://info.tuwien.ac.at/hsk/sefi/papers/schaufel.htm](http://info.tuwien.ac.at/hsk/sefi/papers/schaufel.htm)

[http://www.statlab.uni-
heidelberg.de/projects/voyager/](http://www.statlab.uni-
heidelberg.de/projects/voyager/)

~~~
BruceM
I've occasionally wanted to run System3 again. I wonder what it would take
(for OS X)...

~~~
pjmlp
You can run it as part of AoS, as System 3 Kernel module is remapped to Active
Oberon Kernel module.

[http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front](http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front)

But Active Oberon fails to run on modern hardware, the best you can do is a
VM, and even then builds tend to be scarce.

[http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/topic,692.0.html](http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/topic,692.0.html)

------
willvarfar
Amazing what fits in 2.8MB :D

I recall playing with it in the late 90s (it was old then) and being blown
away by how much 'better' than Windows NT (which I was using at the time) it
was.

I've always liked Pascal (being from the Turbo Pascal European Coverdisk
Generation).

I'm going to have to download this and give it a spin :)

~~~
pjmlp
The worst part is that we suffered a 20 year VM detour, and only now are
returned to having AOT compilation to native code in safe languages.

At least in what concerns mainstream languages.

After ETHZ research, only Singularity and Midori seem to have tried the same
approach.

~~~
insulanian
> The worst part is that we suffered a 20 year VM detour, and only now are
> returned to having AOT compilation to native code in safe languages.

Which languages are you referring to?

~~~
pjmlp
20 years ago the Oberon variants, Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, Delphi, Eiffel,
Visual Basic 6 were all AOT compiling to native code with their canonical
toolchains.

Than Java and .NET became widespread, and the return to VM craziness started,
like the early days of P-Code VMs.

Now 20 years later Microsoft finally supports .NET Native (ngen was only meant
for faster startups) and has AOT in mobile phones since version 8.

Google replaced Dalvik with ART and Oracle is finally following the commercial
JDKs in AOT support for Java 10+.

Then we have the new kids on the block, Swift, Go, Rust, D, Nim, OCaml,
Haskell, ATS.

------
SixSigma
Plan9's Acme text editor [1] was based on ideas from Oberon.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29)

That's my screenshot :)

Acme is available for Unix likes via plan9port [2] and for Windows via Acme-
sac [3] (Inferno running with Acme instead of the window manager)

[2] [https://swtch.com/plan9port/](https://swtch.com/plan9port/) but also see
your distro's package system, it might be in there already

[3] [https://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/](https://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/)

------
nickpsecurity
I'd like to see such apps let users do for Oberon Workstation what this person
did for Windows 3.1:

[http://www.networkworld.com/article/2223927/opensource-
subne...](http://www.networkworld.com/article/2223927/opensource-subnet/why-
this-linux-user-is-now-using-windows-3-1.html)

You could have a lightweight, safe platform you do everything in that's sync'd
to various devices. A bit of popularity might get more work into it. Remember,
though, that A2 Bluebottle is the most recent Oberon system probably with the
most features. I could be wrong on last part. It worked fine (and fast!) in
VirtualBox.

------
jkleiser
What a great surprise! I look forward to re-learn this system and language.
I'm glad Oberon isn't dead. I just discovered this
[http://oberon.vishap.am](http://oberon.vishap.am) and this
[https://github.com/BlackBoxCenter/blackbox](https://github.com/BlackBoxCenter/blackbox).

~~~
jcbeard
This is awesome, I was just digging through some Oberon literature the other
day (well, two weeks ago). Love it!

------
zeeshanm
I downloaded but I am lost. Where do I exec the help command?

[http://imgur.com/TccpbXS](http://imgur.com/TccpbXS)

~~~
i_don_t_know
I haven't downloaded it yet, so I don't know. Have you tried

\- the normal Help in the Apple menu bar?

\- typing: System.OpenFile Help.Text and "middle-clicking" on System.OpenFile?

\- typing: System.Help and "middle-clicking" on System.Help?

I don't know how familiar you are with the Oberon system. The machines had a
three-button mouse and you executed commands by middle-clicking. On the Mac
that's usually emulated by ctrl+left-click or option+left-click or
command+left-click.

A command is: ModuleName.ProcedureName written anywhere, for example, the menu
bars are really just normal text boxes that can be edited like any other text
box.

