[Oberon] Complete Spartan-6 system under $100

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

Douglas G. Danforth wrote:

> My interest in a stand along small Oberon based system
> is dependent upon the availability in Oberon
> of two applications: (1) email reader and (2) web browser.
> I believe both of those were available under Oberon-IV
> but does that hold true for any of the flavors
> of Oberon that would run on a system such as Wojtek
> has suggested?

I already asked about System-IV. The answer was vague... But, it would be
really nice to consolidate the ETH achievements. System IV is one, System
3 is another. These were very useful collections of great software. The
collection from H.P.Mossenboeck book would be good to have. We should not
saty with just the original Oberon System, because it was a starting point
for many other great pieces of work.

The answer may come back "do it yourself". Well, myself I am not able to
deal with the compilers such as OP2. This is something that the experts
need to bring to to table. We in the community need solid foundations. The
foundations are: (1) A solid soft processor or a few of these; and (b) a
solid compiler able to run 30 years worth of ETH and Linz software. In my
opinion this foundation needs to come from the core experts.

Concerning the soft processor, the RISC5 is probably the one, though I
cannot really comment. On the other hand, a good strategy would be to add
the soft core that is already popular in the FPGA community, while being
close to the Wirth spirit. The core that the Papillo is using would be a
smart choice because then our community can come to them and say "look,
here is a great system that you guys can use". Creating such a synergy
would be really smart.

Hope it helps,
Wojtek