Build Date: Fri Mar 13 01:30:17 2026 UTC
Any magazine without double penetration is a waste of time.
-- Mr. Bad
Yet Another Crazy OS That Never Went Anywhere
2000-01-06 20:00:09
Oberon is this TOTALLY BITCHEN light-weight, highly portable operating system. It roxx like roxx in a boxx, or something. But it never went anywhere. What's up with that?
Oberon is this OS created by bad Swiss gnomes in Switzerland. The whole project is led by Niklaus Wirth, the guy who can't stop making programming languages and the inventor of Pascal and Modula-N (where N=1,2,3...). The dealy-do is that they were making this network of low-cost workstations, and so _NATURALLY_ they had to make their own operating system to go with it.
And of course NATURALLY they made their own PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE to write software for the OPERATING SYSTEM that worked on the workstation. In a blazing lack of creativity they named both the language and the OS "Oberon," after one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn or some wack-ass planet or other.
The OS & GUI were fairly unremarkable, except for two things: first, it had a cool tiled windowing system. Most window systems (X-Windows, Windows, Mac) are overlapped, meaning you can put one window on top of another. But Oberon is TILED, so that each window fits into a particular place on the screen. That may sound totally CRAZY, but it works real good.
The other thing is that there's no DIFFERENCE between data and programs. What I mean is that you can write a little program on the screen, and click on it, and it RUNS. It's kinda weird and hard to explain, but EVERYTHING is DATA, and EVERYTHING is PROGRAM.
Anyways, the cool part is that it turns out that Oberon (both the OS and language) were written in a good enough way that they're really PORTABLE. (Don't forget that Pascal was one of the original really-portable languages. The early compiler was written in p-code (Pascal code -- get it?) so lots of people could spread it around. Kinda like Java now.) The Oberon team had a bunch of goofy-looking Swiss graduate students sitting around the labs on their asses, so they went ahead and made these guys port everything to lots of machines, like PCs and Macs and what have you. Which also worked great.
I first heard about Oberon in like 1992. I didn't have Internet access, so I had to send a SASE to Switzerland to get it on a floppy. But I got really into it and learned the sicko Pascal-like language and all the OS-calls (object- oriented interface to the OS, by the way -- real fun to program in!) and wrote some good programs and learned how to do TCP/IP programming from the thingy. If Oberon had turned out to be the next Linux, man, I would have been right in the middle of things.
But, unfortunately, this whole damn project is STALLED. I don't know what's up with these folks. Maybe they're just gonna keep Oberon in crazy mothballs forever. At least they don't have to kill off the crazy ass thing, like Lucid did with useless Inferno, since they all work at a European university and can afford to dick around with a going-nowhere OS for the rest of their lives. But, well, BUMMER. This Oberon is cool (unlike this one). So go check it out and learn a little something.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Crossroads are real and The Blues is a place; The enduring myth of Robert Johnson (More...)
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Peppermill Is Not Good For You
Paradise lounge on the strip. Expense it, bad boy! (More...)
Brother Wayne Lays Down the Truth
Flesh interviews Wayne Kramer of MC5. (More...)
We here in SMRL's Beverage Research Lab realize that there is more to life than just drinking spocktails. It's important to have other activities. One such activity that we wholeheartedly support is dancing six or more hours to Trance music. So we have designed a drink to accommodate this. (More...)
The Walken / Country Bear Conspiracy
As has been recently reported in the PDJ, Christopher Walken, evil s00per villain extraordinaire, will be appearing next month in Disney's newest release, The Country Bear Movie. Always playing some wicked and very disturbed badass in movies like Sleepy Hollow, Illuminata, The Prophecy I, II, III, Pulp Fiction, Batman Returns, The Milagro Beanfield War, A View to a Kill, The Dogs of War, Heaven's Gate, and The Deer Hunter, Walken is unsuprisingly a big favorite in the PDJ news room. (More...)
Paranoid Strippers & Psychotic Crack Dealers (Tales of Christmas Eve)
Christmas day, for the last 17 or so years has bored me. I find that the real fun and excitement always takes place on Christmas Eve. Every other year, it's the excitement of the metaphorical hunt instead of the kill. Otherwise, it's just plain bad craziness. (More...)
The Ancient and Correct Sake Ceremony
Many Americans have learned to appreciate the delicate, sophisticated flavors of Japanese food and drink, along with the beautifully refined rituals of Japanese dining. San Francisco, as a gateway between East and West, has especially benefited from the flowering of Eastern consciousness in America. It is hardly possible to walk down the street without stepping on somebody's sushi. (More...)
