- How to get oberon system mac os x#
- How to get oberon system movie#
- How to get oberon system software#
- How to get oberon system windows#
You can get a recent version of Oberon on or from the Oberon Community Platform. It’s most likely unlike everything else you’ve ever seen. Sounds cool, can I play around with this stuff?
How to get oberon system movie#
There’s a movie on YouTube showing how zooming in Oberon works. A document can be its own icon, and its own window. All you have to do to interact with one is to zoom in close enough. Essentially, all documents can be open all the time. In some ways, this also obsoletes the idea of opening a document. It’s especially cool on netbooks with tiny screens.
How to get oberon system windows#
This essentially obsoletes concepts like virtual desktops, application switchers, or Exposé, since you have as much space as you need on your one desktop, and since you don’t need to rearrange windows in order to get an overview of your open stuff. When people held presentations using Oberon, they would arrange all slides next to each other, zoom in on the first one, and then simply slide the view one screen size to the right to go to the next slide. Instead of stacking windows, hiding them behind each other (which is possible in modern versions of Oberon), you simply arrange them next to each other and zoom out and in again to switch between them. It’s incredibly easy to move around on this plane and zoom in and out of it. Oberon’s «desktop» is an infinitely large two-dimensional space on which windows (and documents, since the distinction becomes meaningless in some ways) can be arranged: 3 Working on something specific which requires you to execute the same commands again and again (such as compiling and executing an application)? Simply type the commands somewhere and you’ve essentially created your own ad-hoc user interface for your current task. Need to explain to your aunt what application to launch? Tell her to click on a word in the e-mail you just sent her. Want to write a tutorial on a topic? You can include all kinds of commands right inside the tutorial and simply tell readers to click on them. You need a program launcher? Create a new text file with the programs you need. This may seem weird at first, but is actually extremely cool because it allows for some neat features. To launch applications or execute commands, you first type them somewhere (anywhere, it doesn’t matter), and then middle-click them: Everything is a Command LineĮven though Oberon is a graphical, mouse-driven user interface, it is also very much text-based. Obviously, Oberon has evolved a lot of weird features that are not found in any of the «Lisa-based» GUIs. In some ways, the result is closer to the Canon Cat than to any other modern system.
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How to get oberon system software#
The software system developed for the Lilith was Modula-2 and later Oberon, which is both a programming language and an OS with a unique text-based graphical user interface.īasically, Oberon ignored all that Lisa stuff and progressed from an entirely different branch of the GUI genealogy: In the early 80s, the strangely named Lilith Workstation was one of the world’s first high-resolution computers with a graphical user interface.
![how to get oberon system how to get oberon system](http://www.ivectornls.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/What-is-metatron-oberon-28-1024x576.png)
These projects were based on the Alto Niklaus Wirth 2 had seen at Xerox PARC. So ETH Zürich decided to start working on its own hardware and software systems. They were expensive and often unsuitable for European use (what with our strange umlauts and stubborn insistence on speaking languages different from English). When ETH Zürich started its own computer science program in the 60s, buying computers from the US turned out to be a bit of an issue. The following part is based on what people at ETH Zürich have told me and may or may not be true. Oberon is not part of the «Lisa» line of user interfaces.
How to get oberon system mac os x#
A person used to Vista or Mac OS X would immediately understand how the Lisa works. To this day, these concepts remain essentially unchanged. The Lisa marked the first modern user interface with windows, icons as objects, menus and mouse input. Extremely simplified, the evolution of modern graphical user interfaces goes something like this: The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces. Steven Frank’s essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich.