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.
Oberon, a delightfully insane system
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#12It'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 v…
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)
They also did the hardware and taught at ETHZurich.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#13Oberon was one of the inspirations for Plan 9 From Bell Labs, of which I am very happy user.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#14From 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)
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#15From 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)
And for the console, dvtm.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#16shame 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.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
They also did the hardware and taught at ETHZurich.
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? :)
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#18From 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)
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.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also did the hardware and taught at ETHZurich.
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? :)
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.
Re: Oberon, a delightfully insane system
#20Anyone 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
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