Oberon/Introduction

Audience

A novice interested to learn computing from the foundations will appreciate the freedom from overwhelming and unnecessary complexity imposed by other systems. The more advanced user will find an efficient tool with complete sources allowing study in depth. The system engineer might adapt Oberon to specific requirements including automation, big data computing and data-intensive computing.

Typical usage progresses through these stages.

Installation
Configuration
Production
Bug repair
Customization and development

The reader should install and use at least one Oberon system. An introductory course in programming is a beneficial preparation but not essential.

Most of the wiki boilerplate is eliminated in the "Mobile view" available with a link at the foot of a page. This is particularly helpful if taking a copy of a source Text.

System Characteristics

Oberon was developed as a stand-alone personal workstation and remains viable in that capacity. The system was designed to attain compactness, comprehensibility, efficiency, reliability, responsiveness,^[1] security and simplicity. The extreme compactness is immediately evident to a novice installing ETH Oberon on a bare PC. The complete system including applications, documentation, graphical interface, fonts and source texts was installed from ten HD diskettes^[2]. For the contemporary perspective refer to the following Use Cases.

An Oberon system comprises a collection of modules and this book presents one module per page^[3]. An example is Sort.Mod from ETH Oberon. Additionally there are Tool pages, each of which is a template of executable commands. An example is Sort.Tool. A system building Tool is a template for rebuilding the entire system, including system installer and module packages.

Use Cases

Educational Workstation

Oberon is used as a workstation OS in the course in System Construction at ETHZ.

Personal Workstation

Of all Oberon systems, ETH Oberon, V4 and A2 have the broadest range of application level development for a personal workstation. Nevertheless capabilities are limited in comparison to familiar commercial systems and Unix-like systems. By using an Oberon subsystem in one of these familiar systems, benefits are combined. The subsystem can be installed as an application such as UnixA2. Alternatively the subsystem can be a guest of a hypervisor as when ETH Oberon is hosted by QEMU. The subsystem can also be emulated; the Oberon RISC emulator being a prime example. Refer to the table of system variants.

A leading workstation machine development is at SkuTek Instrumentation. RiskZero and RiskFive machines are listed in the Computers section.

Embedded Control System

Currently a strong interest in Oberon development is in embedded systems. Astrobe provides a MS Windows based integrated development environment for producing Oberon source text and executables for industrial controls. Radiar uses the A2 Swiss Industrial Controller in a pigment blending system.

Comprehensive System

Systems supporting both software development and operational control are now available. Refer the Astrobe RISC5 Workstation and Oberon RTK.

Footnotes

↑ In the preface of The Oberon System (Pub. Addison-Wesley, 1991) Martin Reiser commented "It is the most responsive system by far known to the author. This responsiveness substantially improves user productivity;"
↑ With contemporary facilities, the base system is easily installed using the Oberon0.Dsk image and a hypervisor such as QEMU. Refer to the installation instructions for ETH Oberon.
↑ An Oberon system contains hundreds and in some cases thousands of modules. For any of the system variants, only a small number of modules are presented here. Nevertheless one insight can advance understanding and a small bug fix can be essential to success in a task.

[responsiveness-1] In the preface of The Oberon System (Pub. Addison-Wesley, 1991) Martin Reiser commented "It is the most responsive system by far known to the author. This responsiveness substantially improves user productivity;"

[install-2] With contemporary facilities, the base system is easily installed using the Oberon0.Dsk image and a hypervisor such as QEMU. Refer to the installation instructions for ETH Oberon.

[modules-3] An Oberon system contains hundreds and in some cases thousands of modules. For any of the system variants, only a small number of modules are presented here. Nevertheless one insight can advance understanding and a small bug fix can be essential to success in a task.

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