[justin66]

> Oberon was floating in the air for some years, but nothing happened. This was always a mystery to me.

Oberon was an operating system as well as a language, and Oberon was an operating system without processes. Game over.

I mean, there are other cons, like the UI. But in a world where Unix was a done deal, NT and Plan 9 were being spun up, BSD was breaking free and users were happy enough with their Unix, MacOS and Windows machines, Oberon took simplicity too far in a number of ways. (Pascal and Modula-2 were a better bet)

In a weird coincidence I saw that someone is selling an Oberon system today and advertising its single-process nature as a feature. Some kind of networked realtime finance application or something, pretty niche, and who knows if they'll make any money with it.

[thesz]

Look at Singularity project from Microsoft.

It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.

[ectoplasm]

Singularity has tons of processes called SIPs and they communicate with each other.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/