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I've been mildly interested in Oberon (the language) as of late after reading about Wirth's languages. I remember reading about Pascal and the Modula family some years ago, but always didn't know Oberon was his creation as well and thought it soubded like some weird esolang. I almost wrote a compiler for Oberon when I learned how simple the language is and I needed a compiler for an old architecture.

What were benefits or breakthroughs of the OS when it was created? I wish the 2013 book was available in a physical copy, I'm not a huge fan of PDFs.



Basically the same as Mesa/Cedar, but in more affordable form than Xerox PARC hardware would require.

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

About 1h video with some developers from Mesa/Cedar done by Computer History Museum.

As for what breakthrough, this are full stack graphical workstations written in GC enabled systems programming language.

To bring it to modern context, imagine something like Windows being fully written in .NET Native, but in the 80's.


... in the 80's, with a headcount of 2 (who had other academic duties).

> "The primary goal, to personally obtain first-hand experience, and to reach full understanding of every detail, inherently determined our manpower: two part-time programmers. We tentatively set our time-limit for completion to three years. As it later turned out, this had been a good estimate; programming was begun in early 1986, and a first version of the system was released in the fall of 1988."

I think of Wirth and Gutknecht as demonstrating that one need not be as far out as Terry A. Davis to do small-team end-to-end work. (compare Carver Mead's tall thin person)




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