[Oberon] Commercial system

[Bob Walkden]

From: Jack Johnson [mailto:knapjack at gmail.com] 
Sent: 08 February 2014 07:03
To: ETH Oberon and related systems
Subject: Re: [Oberon] Commercial system

 

I'm not the person for the job, but I often think in those terms in
relationship to education.

Most of us, probably most of the people we admire, learned to do what they
do on hardware much more modest than my cell phone. It seems like with
Moore's law we should be able to put a Ceres workstation at the bottom of
every cereal box by now.

I certainly think there's value left in the tools and methodologies from two
decades ago, and the cost to provide the infrastructure to deliver that
education should have plummeted instead of skyrocketed.

I think there's both room and need for, shall we say, an Amish-inspired
workstation in the educational marketplace.

 

I expect it would be a little buggy

 

B

-Jack

On Feb 7, 2014 5:24 PM, "Douglas G. Danforth" <danforth at greenwoodfarm.com
<mailto:danforth at greenwoodfarm.com> > wrote:

After reading the posts concerning the FPGA and Dr Wirth's
recent work I would think that some enterprising you company
would take up the torch and build a very inexpensive hardware/
software system.  Someone like Steve Jobs (Apple).

I mention Apple because I had the privilege of discussing with
George Pake, in 1975/6, who was director of PARC
(Palo Alto Research Center) why Xerox had not yet brought
forth the Alto as a commercial product.  The short of his
comments were "That's not our charter".

It seems that for ETHZ, it also is not their charter.

Surely there is someone reading this list who would be able
to garner the resources and personal support necessary to
confront the 'big guys', or at leased offer a nice alternative.

-Doug Danforth


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