

Oberon (2009) - olaf
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

======
GuiA
Plan 9's UI works in a quite similar way. I'm not up to date on my history of
those systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is heavy cross pollination
between the two.

Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming
user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested
in this topic to read this wonderful book: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-
Interface-Directions-Intera...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-
Directions-
Interactive/dp/0201379376/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1380936948&sr=8-3&keywords=raskin)

\---

The article linked to at the very beginning is not available on the original
site. Here is an archive.org link:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tum...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/94591835/warning-
a-long-rambly-exploration-of-the-state)

~~~
tujv
Rob Pike says that Oberon was an influence on his Plan 9 text editor, Acme.

[http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme.html](http://plan9.bell-
labs.com/sys/doc/acme.html)

------
asdfs
Eagle Mode
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA))
uses the zoomable UI concept and takes it to an extreme.

~~~
itchitawa
That's how it should be! Pity it's probably actually a pain to use in real
life :P

~~~
Jtsummers
That would be awesome to see on a modern tablet device. The gesture interface
already exists and people are accustomed to it. It would be neat to see a demo
of it at least.

Thinking about it, while not implemented for the whole experience, are there
any apps that do this?

To some extent Safari on OS X does this now (since what version, I'm not
sure). While you can zoom in and around a page, you can also zoom out when the
page is at 100% and get a view of all the open tabs. iPad with its
multitasking control is similar (swipe up with 4 fingers to see all tasks, tap
on one to switch to it). A photo app would, as demonstrated, be an appropriate
use, same with the calendar. Instead of having to hit buttons to move up the
hierarchy allow the users to pinch-to-zoom instead.

------
616c
The text and GUI integration describes exactly why I fell in love with Linux.
There is a GUI, but I will be damned if there are things (save some terrible
GNOME cruft from personal experience) that cannot be facilitated the terminal
commands and scripting. Around the same time in college as I discovered Linux
and began really exploring, I started a sysadmin gig at school maintaining
Winboxen, and the inability to script a lot of core stuff (this was before
Powershell, but my opinion is little has changed beyond "this is the crap
Microsoft thinks you should automate") is incredibly frustrating and what
drove me to admire the utilitarian approach of Linux and other UNIX
environments so so much. That is why Linux, *BSD, and even in a small way OS X
make me really happy.

Oberon seems to harmonize both. That is very cool, and definitely would be an
OS of choice for me.

~~~
pjmlp
You would love Mac OS 1 - 9, Acorn RISC OS, Amiga OS, Atari ST GEM. :)

~~~
616c
Apple was one of the my first computers; I am familiar with the OS 1 - 9 line.
That being said I was a child and I am not too familiar after all these years
if they were like it.

When dealing with a current Mac, people look at me weird as I spend my time in
only two apps: Console.app and Terminal.app. And people wonder why I bitch how
Apple bastardized Unix (and to the fanbois: I know it is just as much BSD's
fault, get off my lawn).

------
sirsar
_To launch applications or execute commands, you first type them somewhere
(anywhere, it doesn’t matter), and then middle-click them_

Has anyone used this extensively? I'm extremely skeptical about the cost of
switching from keyboard to mouse constantly.

And then there's the following: _Need to explain to your aunt what application
to launch? Tell her to click on a word in the e-mail you just sent her._

"Need to create a botnet? Tell your (or your hacked celebrity account's)
Twitter followers to click on a word in the tweet you just posted."

~~~
Joeri
Oberon was the programming language and environment used to teach first year
programming classes at the university of antwerp when I studied there back in
the late 90's. I ended up using it as my main programming environment for
months at a time. There was a definite learning curve because of the weird
mouse approach. They used mouse behavior that I haven't seen anywhere else,
like interclicks (chorded mouse button click combinations). Mostly though
there were keyboard alternatives, like ctrl-enter for middle click, so you
didn't have to have the mouse in hand all the time. Once the learning curve
was over I remember finding the keyboard/mouse behavior quite efficient,
though you did need a three-button mouse to make full use of it.

I initially had a negative reaction to the clunky appearance of oberon and the
weird conventions, but grew to like it quite a bit over the course of the
year. It was really a programmer's OS, because there was essentially no
difference between documents, programs and user interfaces. You could look at
any application and decompose it into its building blocks and program code
quite easily because "view source" was an intrinsic part of the system. The
downside was that it didn't actually _do_ much, given that there was basically
no way to port existing software so it ran inside the oberon environment. Had
it somehow gained the ability to run other programming languages than Oberon
within the same UI paradigm it might have been quite popular as a geek OS.

~~~
pjmlp
Not only that, for me it showed me that it is possible to have operating
systems implemented in GC enabled systems programming languages, contrary to
what C guys keeping on preaching.

Native Oberon System 3 was quite an improvement with the Gadgets interface.

I think only by experimenting such operating systems, in a similar way to Lisp
and Smalltalk machines, one can be convinced of the viability of GC enabled
languages at the OS level.

Sadly, most efforts that came after Oberon don't offer much more than a plain
CLI, thus reinforcing the common belief that GC enabled systems programming
languages are not viable for OS development.

We lost a lot in computing by having just the UNIX/C model as the only one to
follow.

------
malandrew
So every time I see these threads about classic computing systems that did
something interesting or novel (Oberon, Plan 9 Symbolics OpenGenera, BeOS,
Amiga, etc), I want to be able to try them out on my own machine.

After discovering that OpenGenera was available, I tried a bunch to find a way
to run it in a VM in OS X and had no luck finding an Alpha virtual machine
host on which to install it.

Is Oberon one of those systems that I can get up and running in a virtual
machine on OS X in an afternoon?

~~~
GuiA
Yes, you should be able to get Oberon running in VirtualBox through Blue
Bottle OS [1].

Some tweaks do need to be made though [2]

[1] [http://www.a2.ethz.ch/download.html](http://www.a2.ethz.ch/download.html)
[2]
[https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2008/005536.html](https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2008/005536.html)

~~~
malandrew
Thanks. This is most appreciated. I started looking for details on getting it
running after posting this. That second link should prove useful.

~~~
pjmlp
And if you feel like to research how Oberon was implemented, the language, the
kernel level GC and all the rest, there are lots of information available
here,

[http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/](http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/)

The book "Project Oberon" describes the system.

For the Native Oberon's sucessors, EthOS and Blue Bottle, you can additionally
read

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/cszypers/books...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/cszypers/books/insight-ethos.pdf)

and

[http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:26082/eth-2608...](http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:26082/eth-26082-02.pdf)

~~~
jdboyd
I went to look for "Project Oberon" to buy, but 170USD for a used copy is a
bit much for me.

~~~
pjmlp
Why buy when the university makes the PDF of the book available?

------
bluelu
I still remember the days when we had those Oberon machines (not yet
bluebottle) at the computer rooms at the ETHZ. Nobody touched them except the
computer science students. You didn't even needed a login to use them, just a
mouse with 3 buttons for the famous interclick to execute commands! :)

------
itchitawa
This part is the most exciting to me. - "obsoletes the idea of opening a
document. Essentially, all documents can be open all the time. All you have to
do to interact with one is to zoom in close enough."

~~~
gioele
What about documents that can have multiple interpretations?

Where do I zoom to edit and HTML file as a set of tags? Where do I zoom to
edit it inside a WYSIWYG editor? Where do I zoom to see it in a browser?

------
erlkonig
It's a bit silly to claim that outside of Oberon, all modern graphical UIs are
descended from the Lisa. Unix and its many variations were very active in the
early 1980s, and there were non-Lisa sophisticated window systems emerging
around the same time as the Apple Lisa.

I remember seeing Oberon in the late 1980s, running on a Sun workstation which
supported the SunView and X10 - simultaneously (at the time, we'd figured out
how to run SunView in the color buffer and X10 in the overlay buffer,
configured to be a separate virtual screen). In those three environments, I
feel little could be ascribed to the Lisa, but much to PARC.

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zarify
Considering the bit about different European languages, it seems really
strange that words would become links to applications. Sending instructions on
how to do something from your home in <latin character set country> to your
Russian aunt? Better know the Cyrillic version of what you want to launch.

Snark aside, there are some interesting aspects to that; I really like the
idea of simple launcher lists, even if it means you have to know the names of
everything you want to launch. I teach some kids with dyslexia and I can
imagine trying to do this in a classroom environment.

------
pjmlp
Implemented with a GC enabled systems programming language!

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RexRollman
I remember giving Oberon a try in the late 90's. As I recall, Oberon was
available as both an application and as a stand-alone OS.

I really liked the interface of both Oberon and Plan 9. I wasn't really able
to get much done with them back then, as I was a real novice, but I did find
the UI attractive.

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X4
That guy needs a new camera, idk. why, but his camera has a ghosting effect! I
initially thought it's a built-in effect, but it's his camera..weird..

------
davidy123
After reading the article I thought Oberon might be really interesting, then I
watched the linked Youtube video.

