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Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

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Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#3

Post by Rochus »

eterps wrote: post #2

This is great! I remember running System 3 on a 386 back when MS-DOS was king.

Thanks. There is actually also an i386 version of the system in the repository, where I modified the kernel so it runs with Multiboot, making installations much easier. An essential achievement for both platforms were the stand-alone tools, i.e. I can compile and link the whole Oberon system on Linux or any other platform (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/op2/). I even implemented an IDE which I used for the development (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/activeoberon/).

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#7

Post by spijdar »

Oh, this is something I'm going to have to try. Excellent work!

I have to ask, since people who'd know will probably be here, what's the "ten thousand foot view" of Oberon today? I'm aware of the lineage from Pascal/Modula, and that it was a full OS written entirely in Oberon, sort of akin to a Smalltalk or Lisp machine image. What confuses me is the later work on Oberon seems to be something of a cross between a managed runtime like Java or dot net, and the Inferno OS, where it can both run hosted or "natively". Whenever I've skimmed the wikipedia or web pages I've been a bit confused.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#8

Post by Rochus »

spijdar wrote: post #7

Oh, this is something I'm going to have to try. Excellent work! I have to ask, since people who'd know will probably be here, what's the "ten thousand foot view" of Oberon today ? I'm aware of the lineage from Pascal/Modula, and that it was a full OS written entirely in Oberon, sort of akin to a Smalltalk or Lisp machine image. What confuses me is the later work on Oberon seems to be something of a cross between a ma…

Thanks. In contrast to Smalltalk or Lisp, Oberon is originally a native language, and the Oberon System originally was conceived as the native operating system of the Ceres computer used for teaching in the nineties at ETH Zurich. So there is no image as in Lisp or Smalltalk. Oberon lives on today in the form of various dialects and derivatives (such as my Oberon+ or Micron languages, see https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon and https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron). There are indeed Oberon implementations which run on Java or ECMA 335 runtimes, which is possible due to the very restricted pointer handling and memory management of Oberon.

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#9

Post by Rochus »

ike____________ wrote: post #6

Thank you, I've never heard of the Oberon os before.

Oberon is both a programming language and an operating system used mostly for teaching, much like e.g. xv6 or xinu. Similar to the latter, Wirth has written text books about the system, some of which can be downloaded for free (see https://projectoberon.net/ for the PDF links).

Re: Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)

#10

Post by foruhar »

spijdar wrote: post #7

Oh, this is something I'm going to have to try. Excellent work! I have to ask, since people who'd know will probably be here, what's the "ten thousand foot view" of Oberon today ? I'm aware of the lineage from Pascal/Modula, and that it was a full OS written entirely in Oberon, sort of akin to a Smalltalk or Lisp machine image. What confuses me is the later work on Oberon seems to be something of a cross between a ma…

Smalltalk too was originally a full OS running on bare metal back in the Xerox Alto days (1972-ish).
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