[Oberon] Re: Java & Oberon history?

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Antony,
Thank you for this pointer and thanks to everyone else for their 
comments and suggestions!  I think I have enough now to make a 
reasonable statement of the Oberon influence on Java.

-Doug

Antony Tersol wrote:
> There was an article in Wired magazine a few years ago, which included 
> an interview with Bill Joy, I believe, of Sun, and my recollection is 
> that he mentioned Oberon as an influence.
> 
> pause while I do a quick Google on "Wired Bill Joy Oberon" which yields
> 
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.08/jini_pr.html
> 
> 'One Huge Computer
> By Kevin Kelly and Spencer Reiss
> 
> The Net made it possible. Java made it doable. Jini might just make it 
> happen. An on-the-fly, plug-and-work, global nervous system that 
> connects his cam to her RAM to your PDA.
> 
> Also: A conversation with Sun's founding spirit Bill Joy.'
> 
> an excerpt:
> 
> 'One of Joy's favorite engineering maxims - "Large successful systems 
> start as small successful systems" - is another way of saying: Use what 
> already works. In 1994, the Aspen skunkworks already had a workstation 
> running Oberon, an ambitious attempt by Zürich-based Niklaus Wirth, the 
> inventor of Pascal, to create a featherweight system written entirely in 
> one simple programming language. Such knowledge-based computing erases 
> the conventional distinction between the OS and applications.'
> 
> -- 
> Oberon at inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> http://www.lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
> 
>