[Oberon] Java & Oberon history?

[Bob Walkden]

Hi,

Sunday, June 1, 2003, 6:21:24 PM, you wrote:

> Folks,

> A little history question.  I vaguely remember a conversation back in 
> the early 90's where it was mentioned that two ETH members of the Oberon 
> team had gone and worked at SUN Microsystems on the early development of 
> Java.  Is this correct to anyone's knowledge?  If so who were they?

> I am writing a proposal and wanted to mention that ETH has had a strong 
> effect on software development even behind the scenes.  Any help on 
> tracking this down would be appreciated.

in Prof. Wirth's festschrift "The School of Niklaus Wirth - The Art of
Simplicity" there is an essay by Robert Griesemer and Srdjan Mirovic
of Sun Microsystems called "A Compiler for the Java HotSpot Virtual
Machine". The abstract includes the following "Its code generator was
strongly influenced by the design of Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 and
Oberon compilers" and goes on to mention that the compiler is part of
the standard Java 2 RTE. There is more along the same lines in the
paper.

I don't know if they were ever part of the ETH Oberon team; no doubt somebody
will tell you.

-- 
Cheers,
 Bob                            mailto:bob at web-options.com