[Oberon] Re. e-ink and Oberon

[eas-lab at absamail.co.za]

Douglas G. Danforth wrote:
> I have a dream and that dream is to have Oberon be the underlying OS for 
> pen based displays yet to be produced by e-ink of Cambridge, MA.
> 
Why would Oberon be a candidate ?
Because it has a high low-size*hi-speed product.

But why can't this be achieved by others ?
This has puzzled me:
  Is the file structure important ?
  The duplication of code in many modules, does not help the size.
    I guess duplication comes from each 'student' doing a full project ?
    eg. how many times has the 'hex2ascii' routine been rewritten ?
    Partitions.Mod contains a lot of code which would also be in Hex.Mod .
    Perhaps it doesn't matter with dynamic loading of modules ?
    Are they able to be swapped out ?
    Does  e-ink intend to have a Hard-Drive ?
    I never got an answer to the question of why S3 code always uses
    var.pars instead of functions which are easier to read.
    Are these much more efficient.
    The syntax doesn't exclude functional style programing,
    but when I reported a 'failure' when eg. using 
    Cost := Biggest( Cheapest(Shoes)) I was recommended to use the
    var. pars 'work around'. 

> Since I am a physicist by training I have at least 35 notebooks full of 
> calculations.  I would like to replace those books by a single one 
> capable of holding thousands of pages that can be clean, neat, 
> searchable and capable of transmission to others and of high enough 
> quality for submission for publication.
> 
> Needless to say the Oberon display and mouse functionality would be 
> replaced with gester (and possibly voice) recognition.
> 
What's 'gester' ?
Long hours of mouse usage has given me injury problems - which I
previosly thought a myth.   Note that the hand position for mouse
usage is at one extremity of its 'swivel'. A Joy-stick is in the middle
(most relaxed) of the swivel range.  I want a 5 key joystick system !

N-o has generated many 'notebooks' full of info for me recently.
Multiple partitions makes the info-glut managable.
This can't be done with a hand held.
You have to start from the human:
   ten fingers and size of fingers ....etc.
   The chair and table (for productivety) is as important as the computer !
   Note book style can never be 'hi-volume-productive'.
   You don't want to tell me that you do serious calculations without
   sitting down COMFORTABLY ?  Which negates the note book size.

> Does anyone else share this dream?  Does anyone else share this dream 
> strongly enough to kick around what it would take to form a company to 
> sell such a device?
> 
I have dreams that involve n-o, but somewhat different from yours.
I recently had a play with a pen/touch-screen based Motorola A008 
cell-phone: e-mail access, Fax, SMS and WAP, handwriting recognition
..etc.  It's not a new development, yet there seems little demand for
them.   I was impressed, but what the market wants is often very
different from what we want.

-- Chris Glur.