Oberon (operating system)

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Tiled window arrangement of Oberon

Oberon is an operating system, originally developed as part of the NS32032-based Ceres workstation project; it is written entirely in the Oberon programming language. The basic system was designed and implemented by a team of two part-time programmers at ETH Zürich (ETHZ), Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht. It was later extended and ported to other hardware by a team at ETHZ. For a full listing of team members, see ETH Oberon Hall of Fame.

The user interface is neither a GUI nor quite a command line interface, but is tied closely to naming conventions in Oberon (the language). It does not have a prompt or anything similar, but any text appearing on the screen can be edited and used as command input. This is a radical approach that takes some time to get accustomed to. It has not been very influential among more recent operating systems.

The Oberon OS is available for several other hardware platforms, generally in no cost versions. It is typically extremely compact. Even with an Oberon compiler, assorted utilities including a Web browser, TCP/IP networking, and a GUI, the entire package has been able to fit on a single 3.5" floppy disk. The version which runs on bare PC hardware is called Native Oberon.

There is also a version called Oberon V4 that is closer to the original operating system developed by N. Wirth. It was also developed at ETHZ, but the most recent version is at Linz university.

The computer science department at ETHZ has in recent years begun exploring active objects, and concurrency for operating systems and has released an early version of a new language Active Object Oberon and a new operating system for it, first called AOS and now called Bluebottle. It is available from ETHZ with most source via the Internet. Versions are currently available for Intel IA32 single and dual processors and for the StrongARM CPU family.