[Oberon] OLPC - One Laptop Per Child

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Chris,
Your comments just made a connection for me.
ETHZ is to future software as
XEROX is to Apple.
That is, the company Xerox developed the Alto,
Smalltalk, bitmaped graphics, and encorporated
the mouse but did not market any of this.  It took
Apple computer to bring these technologies to the
general public.
I had the privilege of  talking to George Pake who
was the director of Xerox Parc and asking him
circa 1976 when they would market the Alto.
His comment was that they were a research group
and it was not their place to do so.
Now Dr. Wirth got inspiration from Parc to create
the Ceres machine and develop Oberon.  So it looks
as though a new company is necessary to spin off
the efforts of ETHZ.  However, this should have
been done in the late 80's and early '90s.
Oberon Microsystems was one such attempt but
did not have the clout to pull off a revolution.
What's the market for Oberon?  Something like
OLPC?
-Doug Danforth

Chris Burrows wrote:
>> I guess I feel jaded after maybe 15 years of wondering how to 
>> make Oberon more accepted.  
>>     
>
> Don't worry - we just arrived at the party before everybody else did. They
> got held up somewhere but will be arriving soon. 
>
> Even now Oberon is still ahead of its time - the way it slotted relatively
> painlessly (in the guise of Component Pascal) into the .NET environment was
> a good demonstration of that. Remember that it was nearly 15 years after
> Pascal's debut before it really took off on microcomputers. And yet another
> 12 years later (in the form of Delphi) that it probably got its widest
> following (estimates of 2 million developers at its peak).
>
> Oberon will have its time and place but perhaps not exactly in its present
> form. Maybe a universal limited-resource device is the sort of launching pad
> that will make a significant difference.
>
> Regards,
> Chris Burrows
> CFB Software
> http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp
> --
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>
>
>