[Oberon] Booters for ETH-Oberon ?

[Aubrey.McIntosh at Alumni.UTexas.Net]

I have an ongoing interest in boot sectors and booting Oberon (V4
mostly).  This interest spans all of the process beginning when
execution is transferred to 7C0:0000 until the user has control with a
mouse click with an application on the screen.  It includes PXE.  I
have done some reading related to this interest.

I ran AOS from CF on the CV860A
<http://www.lex.com.tw:8080/product/CV860A.htm> for more than a year,
with reboots.  This machine did not have any moving parts.

I am currently engaged in a project to put an Oberon application on a
FLASH based SoC, the PIC32, although I don't know whether this will be
V4 based, or Component Pascal based.  In support of this process, I am
studying the BootLoader and the power on starting sequence in this
processor.  As an aside, I am really enthusiastic about the MIPS
processor since I learned about the PIC32.  MIPS turns out to be in
the WiFi router next to my desk, and a host of other places.

What do you hope to do?

I do note, as an aside, that the state of an Oberon system seems to be
reflected in the linkages available off of Modules.module.  If you
store this to disk on a native machine, and re-read it at boot time,
you should be back where you were.


On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 6:22 AM, Bob Walkden <bob at web-options.com> wrote:
>
>  > 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
>
>
>
>  --
>  Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
>  https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>



-- 
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Aubrey McIntosh, Ph.D.
1502 Devon Circle
Austin TX 78723-1814
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