Oberon (operating system)
Tiled window arrangement of Oberon
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| Developer | Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht |
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| Written in | Oberon |
| Source model | Open source |
| Initial release | 1987 |
| Available in | English |
| Platforms | NS32032, IA-32, Xilinx Spartan, and many others |
| Default user interface | Text user interface |
| License | BSD-style |
| Official website | www.oberon.ethz.ch |
The Oberon System is a modular single user single process multitasking operating system developed in the late 1980s at ETH Zürich using the Oberon programming language. It has an unconventional visual text-based user interface (TUI, see also below in Section 2 User Interface) for activating commands, which was very innovative at that time.
The Oberon operating system was originally developed as part of the NS32032-based Ceres workstation project. It was written almost entirely (and since the 2013 edition, now is described entirely) in the Oberon programming language . The basic system was designed and implemented by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht and its design and implementation is fully documented in their book "Project Oberon". The user Interface and programmers reference is found in Martin Reiser's book "The Oberon System". It was later extended and ported to other hardware by a team at ETH-Zürich and there was recognition in popular magazines. Wirth and Gutknecht (although being active Computer Science professors) referred to themselves as 'part-time programmers' in the book 'Project Oberon'. In late 2013, a couple of months before his 80th birthday, Niklaus Wirth published a second edition of Project Oberon. It details the implementation of the Oberon System using a RISC CPU of his own design realized on a Xilinx FPGA board. It was presented at the symposium organized for his 80th birthday at ETHZ.
According to Josef Templ, a former member of the developer group at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich and later member of the "Institut für Systemsoftware" of Johannes Kepler University of Linz, where one of the versions (V4) was maintained, the genealogy of the different versions of the Oberon System was the following:
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