Oberon OberonThe first time I heard from this operating system was when a guy in my company gave me an old article about Oberon, which was in its early states and about 300kB in size. It only could run after DOS has been started. I had a look in the internet and found out that this system could run native now and or running in a box for many operating systems like DOS, Windows, Mac and Linux. What inpressed me first is the very nice system font (from Hans Eduard Meier) and the nice GUI. I think that it is a pitty that this OS never get famous for industrial and home computing - It is thought as an OS for educational purposes. Despite of that I think it is very powerful and you should have a look at it to make up your own oppinion!
The Oberon Project was started at the Swiss Federal Institute for
Technology (ETH) in 1985 by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht.
Oberon is not just an operating system but a programming language
as well. It first run on a Ceres computer and was thought for
ETH internal usage. After a while they decidet to document Oberon
in some books. In addition, Oberon was ported to more common
computer hardware and would run natively or on top of the already
installed operating system. Today, Oberon is available freely for
many different platforms.
In 1991, Jürg Gutknecht formed the Oberon System 3 Group
that continued the development. They modernized the Interface,
and implemented network support. In 1995, the Oberon System 3
Release 2.0 was finished. Since then, the system has been
constantly improoved and extended.
Screenshot of running Oberon (34kB)
- Native (Intel based) PC
- Linux
- Windows
- MacOS(X?)
and probably others.
