[Oberon] Re. Install your own OS

[John Drake]

--- easlab at absamail.co.za wrote:

> <I have to mention this related 'new fads don't
> usually last' observation.  Yesterday I read about a
> US software package for 'war [& terrorism] tactics
> planning' which using certain mathematical modelling
> was said to be more successful than its competitors
> and was bought by several 'states' incliding Swiss 
> & S.African.  The price of $93'000 was mentioned.
> It mentioned the 1st gulf war's predictions [eg. the
> 
> number of casualties, within various 'stages'],
> compared with the casualties in fact measured, by
> way
> of evaluating the predictive power of the package.
> For me the 1st gulf war is just yesterday [not the 
> distant past] and this package is obviously a
> cutting
> edge tool and not just a toy.   And since the
> original inet-article gave the URL of the supplying
> company [originated by a high ranking military man
> - apparently some of the best brains/education are 
> in the military] I fetched & read the URL. 
> 
> The description was appropriately formal, scientific
> [written for state procurement departments]
> without any 'new age kiddie-hype', but I nearly fell
> off my chair when I read it was written in
> turbo-pascal
> and the hardware requirement was a 286 !

Well considering the fact that most people have
more horsepower on their desktop than what was
used in the Apollo missions and the fact that
NASA still used Amigas long after they were
considered "obselete" this isn't too far
fetched.  Or to put it another way "It's
the algoritm stupid".  (Not calling you 
stupid.  Just rephrasing the Clinton 92
campain slogan.)
 
> Perhaps the greatest appreciation and compliment 
> to ETH will be in the saving of Oberon from oblivion
> ?
> I'll repeat my theme: most results come not from
> more
> effort, but from high-level [more universal]
> principles
> which bear fruit all the way down the heirarchy.
> Eg. I'm not enthusiatic about patching SmartDir.Mod
> but would rather contibute to a system for 
> maintaining any/all *.Mod .

Yeah.  It's past time for a community maintained
Oberon System 3 distribution.  There in an Oberon V4
for Linux maintained at Sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/oberon

As well as a Native Oberon project.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nativeoberon

The V4 project is actually to a "release" state.
The Native Oberon project isn't.  Probably the
reason the V4 project is further ahead is that
they just uploaded all of the source as it was
for starters.  (WILD speculation on my part!)
Native Oberon only has a program for converting
Oberon Text to/from "marked up ASCII".  That
seems promising, but so far the second step
(taking all of the NO source, converting it
and uploading it) hasn't been done.  I really
haven't paid much attention to this project
because I don't use NO very often, but I do
see potential for the overall community.  So
I'm going to start doing this "next step"
myself and hope others will join me.  
 
> Recently/again I wanted to install some linux
> packages.
> What an unjustified punishment !!
> When I ask myself why NO is so much better/simpler: 
> it's because linux lacked the 'top level principle'
> of 
> "keep it as simple as possible".

One of the nice things about Oberon is that it
compiles so fast that complicated "make files"
(which exist to avoid unneccessary compilations)
really aren't needed.  Even years ago on a 386
I had a 1,000 line program that compiled in 
seconds.  A similair C program under Linux
took much longer (painfully slow).

Regards,

John M. Drake



		
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