
Oberon, a delightfully insane system - blasdel
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/
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mahmud
I said this and I will say it again. Oberon, the language, is the most
delightful little thing to write a compiler for. Even more so in s-exp syntax.
The canonical implementation is described in a 40 page tutorial by the MASTER
himself, Wirth :-)

People interested in alternative desktop and GUI environments should also look
at all the biproduct research that came out of Plan9 (NB: there is a
programming language called "Squeak" somewhere in there, it's not the
smalltalk, but something C-ish invented by Rob Pike hacked on by the usual
Bell Labs suspects :-)

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carterschonwald
I feel like this is an excellent example of what happens when you include the
right abstractions in your software from the get go. Very very very cool how
just a few simple ideas avoid a whole bunch of usability issues that
mainstream OSes are only now starting to address.

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silentbicycle
The text-based interface there is probably most immediately accessible in
terms of Wily (<http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/>), a Unix port of Acme
(<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.html>) from Plan9, which was in
turn inspired by Oberon. (I spent a couple days trying wily out. Interesting
system. I never really acclimated to its mouse-centric UI, but I think it
integrates even better without other programs than Emacs does.)

~~~
caerwyn
There is a Unix port of Acme as part of Plan 9 from User Space
(<http://swtch.com/plan9port/>).

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charliepark
Neat stuff. Jef Raskin explores a number of these ideas (ZUIs, command-lines-
everywhere, etc.) in his book The Humane Interface. Some really cool ideas
about UI design.

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mlLK
Anyone here use Sugar as their primary desktop-environment?

I don't know much about Oberon other than this article and it was founded at
the school he graduated from, but Sugar seems like the most modern and
feasible alternative to a GUI akin to something like this.

 _Oberon V4 appears to be orphaned, there are almost no changes since 2000._
-<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_operating_system>

~~~
tamberg
We provide an open source version of the language (Component Pascal = Oberon
V2) and a runtime environment (BlackBox) running on Windows
(<http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html>). Regards, tamberg

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pholbrook
It's a little hard to tell from those screenshots,but it looks like Oberon's
text-based interface could have been influenced by the Xerox PARC Cedar
environment or possibly the XDE/Tajo environment that Xerox used internally to
develop the Xerox Star. Cedar would be the more likely guess because Wirth
spent time at PARC.

Modula 2 was influenced by the Mesa language developed at PARC and used to
develop the Star and various PARC projects.

~~~
ori_b
It was influenced by Cedar. IIRC, Oberon was described as a simplified
successor to Cedar, with an initial usable implementation from the kernel and
language up designed and created in 3 years by 2 people.

See the "Project Oberon" section in "A Plea For Lean Software"
(cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf)

~~~
MaysonL
They also did the hardware and taught at ETHZurich.

~~~
miracle
We learned OBERON in the first programming course. There were also oberon
workstations available for students to browse the web, but nobody was using
them, so they got replaced.

Anybody else remember the inter click? :)

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voidpointer
Yep, my introductory programming course at university was also based on Oberon
(actually, it was the second course, the first one was based on Miranda). I
absolutely loathed the interface with the interclicks and crummy text editor.
The concepts in the system were good. In my opinion it was just an utter
usability failure.

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bulanga
shame it doesn't work in VMWare.

I tried both isos, the 7MB and 77MB one and tweaked a little bit with the
settings but I just get a black screen, it doesn't seem to boot at all.

If anyone does manage to get it going could you please post some instructions?
Thanks.

~~~
LukasMathis
I think there are Oberon applications for Linux and Windows, one of the
article's links goes to an ETH page with downloads for these. Other than that,
you can try running it in Parallels. It didn't work in VMWare on my system,
either, but the trial version of Parallels ran it just fine.

~~~
dnewcome
I tried out the Windows version. All you have to do is extract the 2 system
archives into a folder somewhere on your disk and run the executable. It looks
like you get the whole environment, with the ability to create multiple
document windows. I haven't played with it further though, so I'm not sure how
it would differ from running it right on the hardware.

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anigbrowl
I wonder if this helped to inspire/would dovetail with Ubiquity. I use Chrome
rather than Firefox but I hope Ubuity will get ported for this browser when
Google opens up the plugin interface.

~~~
speek
Honestly, I have no idea why they're limiting it to be firefox only. They're
using the wrong level of abstraction, it should be available to all
applications. (IMO)

~~~
anigbrowl
Chrome isn't open for plugin development AFAIK, is all. And I quite understand
them not bothering with IE. I didn't mean to suggest that the Ubiquity team
were trying to tether anyone.

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cubicle67
What's insane about it? It's brilliant!

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plaes
From what I read, then all the fluff about Oberon is mostly about the tiling
window manager.

In case anyone wants to try something like this on modern operating systems
then it is actually possible: Xmonad, awm, ratpoison, ion, larswm... (and list
goes on)

~~~
DannoHung
I like the idea of a TWM zooming out, showing you all your windows scaled
down, and then allowing you to come up with window groupings in a visual way.

Or, maybe you could zoom all the way out, then start tossing out windows you
don't care about and the windows rearrange themselves and zoom in as you do
so.

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skwiddor
Oberon was one of the inspirations for Plan 9 From Bell Labs, of which I am
very happy user.

