[Oberon] Dear Mr. Angelich (Ghost),

[Stefan Salewski]

Dear Mr. Angelich,

since a few weeks you are sending messages to oberon at inf.ethz.ch,
I think the average number in more than 3 daily.

I have stopped reading your messages for about one week after 
your silly comments about the 3-button-mouse. (A 3-button-mouse 
is cheap (10 EURO for my Logitech Pilot-Mouse), usefull (cut and 
pase in Linux, middle button to launch programs in Windows) and 
most computers here at Institut for Laser-Physiks at Hamburg 
University have a 3-button-mouse or a wheel-mouse which can be 
used as 3-button-mouse.) Oberon was designed for a 
3-button-mouse, after some practice most people can work with 
interclicks. I am not sure if these choise of using interclicks 
is the optimum for the user-interface of oberon. Maybe there 
exist better solutions. If you have a new design for mouse-usage 
for oberon and you are willing to reprogramm the user-interface, 
then we can discuss your suggestions. But we should not waste 
time just for complaining. A factory of pianos will not start 
building pianos with only two keys just because you think there 
are too many keys.

In the last days I readed a few other messages from you. Some of 
your points, like too many documentation and problems with some 
hardware-compoments may be justified. But You have to see this:

ETH-Oberon is mainly a research project. Manpower at ETH and 
manpower of Oberon-users outside of ETH is limited. For me 
ETH-Oberon (native and blue-bottle) is an interesting project. 
People at ETH have done very good work. If you have an 
Intel-compatible PC with IDE-harddisk, vesa-compatible graphic 
card, then chances are not bad that Oberon will run on your 
computer. There is support for 3COM-network cards, and for some 
other hardware. If you try to use very old hardware, for example 
a display with resolution less than 1024x768 points, there may 
be some problems. But it should not be too diffical to fix it. 
In the current state ETH-Oberon can not compete with 
MicroSoft-OS or Linux. I like Oberon, because I like the 
language, I like a compact OS with open source-code, and I like 
the helpful people at ETH. Most of my work I am doing with 
Linux, I use Oberon just for fun, for some data-processing and 
for numerical simulations. Its not perfect, but it works.

I think it is not a good idea to send soo many messages to this 
list. I have not the time to read it or even to respond, and I 
think other people too. People at ETH have much work to do, they 
must concentrate on serious problems. You should decide if you 
like ETH-Oberon or like it not. If you like it, try go get all 
available information about it. Buy some books, for example "The 
Oberon Companion" and other older books, and read it. Then 
concentrate on the most serious problems. There are many 
interesting tasks for all of us: Writing new software, writing 
new Drivers for unsupported hardware, writing documentation.

Best regards

  Stefan Salewski