From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20121025152809.49ec4acb@vardo.ethans.dre.am> References: <826abb8cf0c1ea41e3ebc081df3169c7@proxima.alt.za> <20121025152809.49ec4acb@vardo.ethans.dre.am> From: Dan Cross Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:58:39 -0400 Message-ID: To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: Re: [9fans] Acme: the way the future actually was Topicbox-Message-UUID: c9773a7c-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote: > On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 08:48:40 -0800 Jack Johnson wrote: > > Even with it's "faults" (age?), I still miss Oberon. It was *fun* and elegant. > > It's still around in AOS form where it can run native or as a > user-space program under other OSs. I used it to try out someone else's > work and didn't really find the UI very elegant. In particular I > couldn't copy text from the compiler error window, which I thought was > desperately bad. Anyway, apart from that it worked; middle-clicking to > compile and to launch the program was ok, and the OpenGL program I was > trying out ran very smoothly. > > The only link I seem to have kept is http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/ Hindsight is always 20/20. When I first used Oberon 20 years ago, it had this amazing liberating feeling to it; a graphical demonstration of sorting algorithms? Brilliant! (I was in high school. Our "Computer Science" class was taught using Turbo Pascal on IBM PCs; the textbook had a picture of an IBM 4381 on the cover. Luckily, I managed to persuade the system administrators at the local university into giving me accounts on most of the major systems so I could use C, Unix and VMS.) My point is that it's so easy to forget that these sorts of statements about the power, simplicity and elegance of things past carry with them a context that is usually not explicitly articulated. If you came to Oberon from some primitive computing environment (like, say, PCs or something) then it was indeed fun and amazingly elegant. That said, I wouldn't want to go back to running it on a SPARCstation 1 with 16 megs of RAM, a 200MB disk, and a 17 inch black and white CRT. It's easy to look back and say to oneself, "wow, that wasn't as cool as I remembered it being..." but that doesn't change that, at the time, it *was* that cool because of the context. - Dan C.