After discovering that OpenGenera was available, I tried a bunch to find a way to run it in a VM in OS X and had no luck finding an Alpha virtual machine host on which to install it.
Is Oberon one of those systems that I can get up and running in a virtual machine on OS X in an afternoon?
Some tweaks do need to be made though [2]
[1] http://www.a2.ethz.ch/download.html [2] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2008/005536.html
Found the link at: http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/OCP/Downloads#toc4
Seems to run just fine, though it is only running in a window and not as the OS ofcourse.
This was introduced as the system started to spread into other universities outside ETHZ, where the Cedar machines were being used.
Thinking about it, while not implemented for the whole experience, are there any apps that do this?
To some extent Safari on OS X does this now (since what version, I'm not sure). While you can zoom in and around a page, you can also zoom out when the page is at 100% and get a view of all the open tabs. iPad with its multitasking control is similar (swipe up with 4 fingers to see all tasks, tap on one to switch to it). A photo app would, as demonstrated, be an appropriate use, same with the calendar. Instead of having to hit buttons to move up the hierarchy allow the users to pinch-to-zoom instead.
I'm just emerging it: emerge -av x11-wm/eaglemode
Has anyone used this extensively? I'm extremely skeptical about the cost of switching from keyboard to mouse constantly.
And then there's the following: Need to explain to your aunt what application to launch? Tell her to click on a word in the e-mail you just sent her.
"Need to create a botnet? Tell your (or your hacked celebrity account's) Twitter followers to click on a word in the tweet you just posted."
I initially had a negative reaction to the clunky appearance of oberon and the weird conventions, but grew to like it quite a bit over the course of the year. It was really a programmer's OS, because there was essentially no difference between documents, programs and user interfaces. You could look at any application and decompose it into its building blocks and program code quite easily because "view source" was an intrinsic part of the system. The downside was that it didn't actually do much, given that there was basically no way to port existing software so it ran inside the oberon environment. Had it somehow gained the ability to run other programming languages than Oberon within the same UI paradigm it might have been quite popular as a geek OS.
Native Oberon System 3 was quite an improvement with the Gadgets interface.
I think only by experimenting such operating systems, in a similar way to Lisp and Smalltalk machines, one can be convinced of the viability of GC enabled languages at the OS level.
Sadly, most efforts that came after Oberon don't offer much more than a plain CLI, thus reinforcing the common belief that GC enabled systems programming languages are not viable for OS development.
We lost a lot in computing by having just the UNIX/C model as the only one to follow.
Rob Pike and any devoted Acme users?
Oberon seems to harmonize both. That is very cool, and definitely would be an OS of choice for me.
When dealing with a current Mac, people look at me weird as I spend my time in only two apps: Console.app and Terminal.app. And people wonder why I bitch how Apple bastardized Unix (and to the fanbois: I know it is just as much BSD's fault, get off my lawn).
Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...
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The article linked to at the very beginning is not available on the original site. Here is an archive.org link: http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tum...
Where do I zoom to edit and HTML file as a set of tags? Where do I zoom to edit it inside a WYSIWYG editor? Where do I zoom to see it in a browser?
I remember seeing Oberon in the late 1980s, running on a Sun workstation which supported the SunView and X10 - simultaneously (at the time, we'd figured out how to run SunView in the color buffer and X10 in the overlay buffer, configured to be a separate virtual screen). In those three environments, I feel little could be ascribed to the Lisa, but much to PARC.
Snark aside, there are some interesting aspects to that; I really like the idea of simple launcher lists, even if it means you have to know the names of everything you want to launch. I teach some kids with dyslexia and I can imagine trying to do this in a classroom environment.
I really liked the interface of both Oberon and Plan 9. I wasn't really able to get much done with them back then, as I was a real novice, but I did find the UI attractive.
