Comment by dang
10 years ago
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.
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.
Wow, that's fascinating.
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.
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.
Looks like one hell of an out-of-print book: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=peter+kogge....