[Oberon] more attention and a larger community?

[Treutwein Bernhard]

Jack Johnson wrote:

> there's potential to revisit and leverage existing code 
> from each of the other Oberon flavors to find convergence. 
> If Native Oberon can support IP, certainly there's some hope 
> for bringing over that implementation to V5. The first step 
> would be to find a wired Ethernet chipset that's either adaptable 
> to the Spartan-3 or easily emulatable

first remark on naming and versions:

I don't remember, who brought up the misleading name V5, but please
please do not use V5 for PO2013. V5 would imply in my eyes that it is
a successor to V4, but PO2013 is not a successor to any of the more 
advanced later versions be it V2, S3, V4 or even A2. 

PO2013 is a kind of a fork of V1. 

I like the idea of FPGAOberon as proposed by Markus Greim, but we 
should chose a name and stick to it using it consistently.
I have tried to shed some light on the versions in Wikipedia 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)#History

Some more info may be found in the archives of Oberon at ETHZ:
http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/archives/systemsarchive/sys_genealogy_new 

I did not grew up at ETHZ, and in the earlier years I never 
was able to afford a large monitor privately so I had my first
steps with Oberon on a Sun SPARC workstation with J. Templ's V4. 
But for productive programming I was still using Modula-2 (TopSpeed
at that time). As soon as I read Dick Pountains notes on  BlackBox 
(Oberon/F at that time) in Byte Jan. 1995, I switched over to it.

Except BlackBox none of the different versions of the Oberon System
really were finished products, but all of them were kind of research 
projects with some really awesome ideas (e.g. slim binaries aka OMI
or Oberon Module Interchange, see notes on ).

Now to extending the user base:

I am not sure, how it can be done, but as far as I know, every
source of any V4 is available at sourceforge (thanks to Claudio
Nieder, who moved his UV4 to that repository): 

    https://sourceforge.net/projects/oberon/
    https://sourceforge.net/p/oberon/oberonv4/ci/master/tree/

Maybe it would be worthy to try to do a similar repository for
System-3. I have no idea, if anybody ever tried to create a 
native V4 for IA32.

I do really not know where to start ...

I agree with Markus Greim (psoted Sun, May 4th) that an important 
point is the licensing issue.

regards
--
  Bernhard