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Project Oberon

projectoberon.com

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Re: Project Oberon

#81

Post by dang »

pjmlp wrote: post #58
kylebrown wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Re: Project Oberon

#82

Post by dang »

eggy wrote: post #59
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 Li…

Looks like one hell of an out-of-print book: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=peter+kogge....

Re: Project Oberon

#83

Post by kragen »

ghshephard wrote: post #61
coldtea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said? In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection. I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago…

What school did you go to?

Re: Project Oberon

#84

Post by pjmlp »

pjmlp wrote: post #58
kylebrown wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replying to my own post. As it is already frozen for editing.

Please note the sentence

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

we is wrong! Stupid mobile autocorrection, it should be read he.

Re: Project Oberon

#85

Post by carapace »

w23j wrote: post #70
carapace wrote: post #32

Be sure to read "Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" generously published online as a pdf: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/ProjectOberon.pdf There are emulators for Wirth's new cpu in JS, Java, C, and Python. You can run it in the browser from here: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ (Shameless plug: https://github.com/PhoenixBureau/PythonOberon I wrote the Python emulator. I…

Correct me if I am wrong, but the page has links to the book you mention as well. However, the your link says Edition 2005 while the pdfs linked to by the posted page say Revised Edition 2013 .

D'oh! My bad. I was just so excited to see Oberon on the front page.

Re: Project Oberon

#86

Post by osahal »

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.

Sounds fantastic, but I'm sure it's not. If you made billions on a product such as did Xerox you'd be keen to fully investigate a technology that threatens to supplant your bread and butter product, fear will drive you to do this. Once the product has been developed you will look at it and say "Product X has a return of y, while there are zero customers for this newfangled product", this is more than enough for the board to reject the new idea, many of them think the new technology is just a passing fad anyway.

Re: Project Oberon

#87

Post by kjs3 »

ghshephard wrote: post #61
coldtea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, if you don't know what garbage collection is (and I don't mean this as sneer) how are you sure that you understood everything else said? In the sense that garbage collection is a pretty basic CS term, and the summary contained lots of CS terms and implied knowledge to understand it (modules, interfaces, persistence, etc).

Garbage collection was never really anything I recall being discussed in my Cmpt Science curriculum, back in 1990-1993, though there was lots of interesting theory about memory allocation/deallocation/defragmentation. It wasn't until I ran into Java around 2000 or so that people started talking about Garbage Collection. I'm not saying that it didn't exist, it was just less of a priority 25 years ago than 15 years ago…

Says a lot about your program. It was a topic of huge importance when I was studying CS (1985-1989ish).

Re: Project Oberon

#88

Post by aggyger »

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…

The acme editor was new to me so thanks for that. The comment about spreadsheets reminded me of an interview on the Thoughtbot Podcast with Chris Granger about a new IDE being developed called Eve. [podcast link](http://giantrobots.fm/111) If I understand correctly, the idea is that its like excel, but you use it to build domain editors, but it revolves heavily around constraint solvers? I don't know, but the podcast episode is awesome. Bottom line is that I'm giddy to use it [link to the announcement post](http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/)

Re: Project Oberon

#89

Post by thesz »

justin66 wrote: post #78
Keyframe wrote: post #18

Oberon. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Once upon a time there was a great crossroad in the early 90's (when I was a kid and learning programming - keep in mind that perspective). BASIC was on its way out - we all knew it to some extent due to home computers renaissance, but it was evident it didn't have any staying power. So there were all these wonderful machines with different architectures, OS'…

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me. Oberon was an operating system as well as a language, and Oberon was an operating system without processes. Game over. I mean, there are other cons, like the UI. But in a world where Unix was a done deal, NT and Plan 9 were being spun up, BSD was breaking free and users were happy enough with their Unix, MacOS and…

Look at Singularity project from Microsoft.

It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.

Re: Project Oberon

#90

Post by ectoplasm »

thesz wrote: post #89
justin66 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me. Oberon was an operating system as well as a language, and Oberon was an operating system without processes. Game over. I mean, there are other cons, like the UI. But in a world where Unix was a done deal, NT and Plan 9 were being spun up, BSD was breaking free and users were happy enough with their Unix, MacOS and…

Look at Singularity project from Microsoft. It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.

Singularity has tons of processes called SIPs and they communicate with each other.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

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