Oberon operating system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oberon is an operating system, originally developed as part of the NS32032-based Ceres workstation project; it is written entirely in the Oberon programming language. The entire system was designed and implemented by a team at ETH Zürich including Niklaus Wirth and associates.
The user interface is neither a GUI nor quite a command line interface, being instead tied closely to naming conventions in Oberon (the language). This approach has not been very influential among more recent operating systems.
The Oberon OS is available for several other hardware platforms, generally in no cost versions. It is typically extremely compact. Even with an Oberon compiler, assorted utilities including a Web browser, TCP/IP networking, and a GUI, the entire package has been able to fit on a single 3.5" floppy disk. The version, which runs on bare PC hardware is called Native Oberon.
There is also a version called Oberon V4 that is closer to the original operating system developed by N. Wirth. It was also developed at ETH, but the most up to date version is at Linz university.
The computer science department at ETHZ has in recent years begun exploring active objects, and concurrency for operating systems and has released an early version of a new language Active Object Oberon and a new operating system for it, first called AOS and now called Bluebottle. It is available from ETH with most source via the Internet. Versions are currently available for Intel IA32 single and dual processors and for the StrongARM CPU family.
