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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#51

Post by dang »

kylebrown wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #26

Project Oberon is a design for a complete computer system. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment. Yes! We need so much more of this. If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/rea…

Speaking of smalltalk, was project Oberon inspired by Alan Kay's STEPS project to implement a full OS + apps in under 20k LoC? http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

Oberon dates from the 80s, so much earlier. But they are clearly kindred spirits in wanting to make whole systems that a single person can understand.

Re: Project Oberon

#52

Post by skybrian »

dang wrote: post #27
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

Wow, this is excellent. The Oberon and Bluebottle OS materials have always been quite scattered, so someone putting them in a central index is quite convenient. For those unaware, Oberon's main qualities are the fact that it's a full operating system written in a garbage collected Pascal-like language (actually made by the same person who initially wrote Pascal) which uses said language's module system to provide reu…

> on-screen text that can serve as an entry point or continuation to perform all sorts of computations, things you'd normally write hacky scripts for. The Acme editor famously works this way. So, in a rudimentary way, does the Emacs scratch buffer. It's a weird amalgam of text editor and REPL: you evaluate snippets of text and get the output in-place, and then edit the text to get what you want next. This live-text-a…

Perhaps something like an ipython notebook would be the "modern" way to do it?

Re: Project Oberon

#53

Post by me2i81 »

LimpWristed wrote: post #14

I am new to all this. I was thinking to get started with The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan/Schocken. Is Project Oberon something entirely different? If not, how do they compare?

Oberon is an already-built system designed by Niklaus Wirth, one of the giants of the field. The goal of Elements of Computing Systems is to have you build a more limited but still functional system yourself, so get busy!

Re: Project Oberon

#55

Post by Richard14 »

I don't know why but this kind of project brings me back to my Commodore 64 days. I remember seeing an announcement for a new version of the C64 but it would not make sense unless it could capture the spirit of that little yet powerful 16-Bit device that you can learn so much from and also play amazing games on. Booting straight to Basic as the CLI inspired many of us to just try and write our own little "software". It must have been the beginning of many CS careers. This type of inspiring device can only come in a mobile form these days and none of the current OSes are as beginner friendly and straightforward as Basic on the C64 was. There might be a need for a tablet with an Oberon like system that could attract the teens of today as a customizable and easily programmable device.

Re: Project Oberon

#56

Post by pjmlp »

e12e wrote: post #39
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

Wow, this is excellent. The Oberon and Bluebottle OS materials have always been quite scattered, so someone putting them in a central index is quite convenient. For those unaware, Oberon's main qualities are the fact that it's a full operating system written in a garbage collected Pascal-like language (actually made by the same person who initially wrote Pascal) which uses said language's module system to provide reu…

> highly unconventional user interface that bridges the power of the CLI and the GUI together in this vaguely hypertext-like workspace where you can dynamically live program the UI itself through on-screen text that can serve as an entry point or continuation to perform all sorts of computations, things you'd normally write hacky scripts for. Closest analogue is Xerox's Cedar. Sounds a lot like Smalltalk's print-it/d…

Wirth worked with Cedar at Xerox and wanted a similar experience at ETHZ.

Re: Project Oberon

#57

Post by pjmlp »

escherplex wrote: post #24
brandonmenc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually made by the same person who initially wrote Pascal Niklaus Wirth, for those interested.

A reminder of how curious it is that PARC had all of Kay's, Smith's and Wirth's handiwork under their belt, all the rudiments of today's PC with mouse-controlled icon WYSIWYG GUIs back in the late 1970s, and never had the imagination to go anywhere viable with it (but give it away as dramatized in 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'). Same could be said of PalmPilot and the smart phone.

I do Xerox PARC archeology, always looking for documentation from those days.

This was triggered by having been a Smalltalk and Oberon user on their glory days.

It made me realise how much the IT world lost by having UNIX clones going mainstream instead of these systems. Specially the culture that still insist in using their computers as if they had a PDP-11.

Re: Project Oberon

#58

Post by pjmlp »

kylebrown wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #26

Project Oberon is a design for a complete computer system. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment. Yes! We need so much more of this. If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/rea…

Speaking of smalltalk, was project Oberon inspired by Alan Kay's STEPS project to implement a full OS + apps in under 20k LoC? http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

It was inspired by Cedar.

Wirth took sabbatical years to work at Xerox PARC in the two occasions.

After the first visit when we learned about Mesa, we designed Modula-2 and its OS Lillith.

On the second visit he got to use Mesa evolution, Cedar, which was his inspiration for Oberon and the Ceres workstation.

Re: Project Oberon

#59

Post by eggy »

dang wrote: post #26

Project Oberon is a design for a complete computer system. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment. Yes! We need so much more of this. If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/rea…

Lisp Machines. I am reading the book, 'The Architecture of Symbolic Computers' written in 1990 by Peter M. Kogge. Amazing book. It's really teaching me a ton of computer science at a level in one shot that no other book has. People fail to realize at times, that Linux was a choice in the road, and people just stuck with it. There could have been so many other ways to go: smalltalk machines, Lisp machines, Minix vs Linux, etc... Love this stuff.
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