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> an innovative (at that time) operating system The UI paradigm involving Oberon's "system track" is still really interesting. This isn't fanfare. I put some serious hours into messing around with Oberon (re-implementing the compiler like you, working on a couple emulators, working out how to bootstrap the system and build a disk image). Still, I never particularly enjoyed using Oberon, though. About a year or so ago, though, while fumbling around with Firefox's bookmarks, I was entertaining the idea of a "universal sidebar" that would from the perspective of any app or web page be entirely separate but would still be sufficiently powerful to control any one (or all) of them. I realized I was re-imagining Wirth's system track, jotted the idea down, and then moved on. I'm still occasionally reminded of it, of course, due to the same frustrations that led to my daydreaming in the first place. I do most of my computing with browser windows and terminal emulators snapped to either the left or right sides of the screen, anyway, so my existing workflow is entirely amenable to the imposition of parallel tracks. It's an underexplored UI concept on modern desktops. Windows Vista did have a widget engine that it first called the Sidebar and then called Desktop Gadgets, but it it was basically a clone of Konfabulator and the Mac Dashboard and not so much a supercharged window manager/app coordinator in the vein of Oberon or Plan 9 Acme, and I don't use Windows anyhow. The Browser Company is doing something sort of interesting with Arc, but it's still just an application-sidebar and not nearly powerful enough for what I want. Plus it's on the wrong side of the screen. |