[pholbrook]

It's a little hard to tell from those screenshots,but it looks like Oberon's text-based interface could have been influenced by the Xerox PARC Cedar environment or possibly the XDE/Tajo environment that Xerox used internally to develop the Xerox Star. Cedar would be the more likely guess because Wirth spent time at PARC.

Modula 2 was influenced by the Mesa language developed at PARC and used to develop the Star and various PARC projects.

[ori_b]

It was influenced by Cedar. IIRC, Oberon was described as a simplified successor to Cedar, with an initial usable implementation from the kernel and language up designed and created in 3 years by 2 people.

See the "Project Oberon" section in "A Plea For Lean Software" (cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf)

[MaysonL]

They also did the hardware and taught at ETHZurich.

[miracle]

We learned OBERON in the first programming course. There were also oberon workstations available for students to browse the web, but nobody was using them, so they got replaced.

Anybody else remember the inter click? :)

[voidpointer]

Yep, my introductory programming course at university was also based on Oberon (actually, it was the second course, the first one was based on Miranda). I absolutely loathed the interface with the interclicks and crummy text editor. The concepts in the system were good. In my opinion it was just an utter usability failure.