[dang]

Project Oberon is a design for a complete computer system. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment.

Yes! We need so much more of this.

If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/smalltalk.html

[kylebrown]

Speaking of smalltalk, was project Oberon inspired by Alan Kay's STEPS project to implement a full OS + apps in under 20k LoC?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

[pjmlp]

It was inspired by Cedar.

Wirth took sabbatical years to work at Xerox PARC in the two occasions.

After the first visit when we learned about Mesa, we designed Modula-2 and its OS Lillith.

On the second visit he got to use Mesa evolution, Cedar, which was his inspiration for Oberon and the Ceres workstation.

[pjmlp]

Replying to my own post. As it is already frozen for editing.

Please note the sentence

> After the first visit when we learned about Mesa, we designed Modula-2 and its OS Lillith.

we is wrong! Stupid mobile autocorrection, it should be read he.

[dang]

Wow, that's fascinating.

[dang]

Oberon dates from the 80s, so much earlier. But they are clearly kindred spirits in wanting to make whole systems that a single person can understand.

[eggy]

Lisp Machines. I am reading the book, 'The Architecture of Symbolic Computers' written in 1990 by Peter M. Kogge. Amazing book. It's really teaching me a ton of computer science at a level in one shot that no other book has. People fail to realize at times, that Linux was a choice in the road, and people just stuck with it. There could have been so many other ways to go: smalltalk machines, Lisp machines, Minix vs Linux, etc... Love this stuff.

[dang]

Looks like one hell of an out-of-print book: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=peter+kogge....