[Oberon] Booters for ETH-Oberon ?

[Bob Walkden]

> I'm including the extract below from OLPC, because it's the first
> confirmation of a principle which is central to me, that I've seen:
> identifying entities by their 'recentcy' is more usefull than eg.
> alphabetically by name [and is handled nicely by mc, which I 
> mentioned].

This is much the same as the principles that Jeff Raskin discussed in
The Humane Interface. In short, whenever you restart whatever you were
doing, the system should return you to where you left off. For
example, when you restart the machine it should resume with what you
were doing when you switched it off. When you open a document (or in
some other way select an object for use) it should open at exactly the
same position and state it was in when you stopped working on it. And
so on.

If I remember correctly, Squeak works somewhat like that, and is quite
quick.

> That's why stacks are usefull.
> Perhaps different users have different thinking methods ?
> Evidently many people prefer to search alphabetically for 
> ThatFunnyNamed873File than 'the one I used yesterday' ?
> 

The ideas that Raskin describes deal with this in quite an interesting
way by eliminating the notion of a file name altogether and using
whole-text search to locate what you want. The idea is 'the context of
a text file is its own best name'. It's an interesting idea and
eliminates in one fell swoop a lot of the consequential clutter and
nonsense such as restrictive rules for file names, directory
structures etc, as well as the mental burden that goes with them.

If you're thinking the way you describe, and like Oberon, I recommend
Raskin's book. You'll find a lot of interesting things in it which
strike a chord with the spirit of Oberon, in my opinion.

Bob