[Oberon] Project Oberon for Mac

Chris Burrows chris at cfbsoftware.com
Mon Jan 11 12:29:52 CET 2016


At least some of the early 68K Mac source code is now available. MacPaint 1.3 primarily consists of a 5800-line Pascal file and a 2700-line assembly language file. In the Feb 1984 Edition of BYTE Magazine which had the Mac as its cover story, Bill Atkinson describes they way he developed the software:

"You go through, get the best algorithms first, get the stuff right. Then crunch it down, make a first pass in Pascal, get the algorithms right, find the cleanest algorithms, find all the corners and make sure they are tested. Then I translate it into loose assembly language to get down into assembly language and get it working." 

There is a whole lot more about the internals of the Mac including interviews with the other members of the team in that magazine if you are interested. Print copies often appear on eBay or you can download it and many other issues of BYTE - including the special Modula-2 edition Aug 1984 year (1984 was a good year!) from the American Radio History website.

Regards,
Chris Burrows

CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> Lars O
> Sent: Monday, 11 January 2016 8:49 PM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Project Oberon for Mac
> 
> R. P. de Jong wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> >
> > I would like to inform you that a new "Project Oberon, Revised
> Edition
> > 2013" product has just been released. It is aimed to make Oberon
> > available for Mac owners who don’t want to tinker or boot into
> > Windows to get it running, like myself.
> 
> 
> You may want to clarify whether you mean Mac, as in the old mac or
> the new macosx.  The old macs were based on pascal, whereas the new
> macosx is objectivec based and bsd based, and such. The old macs were
> pascal systems that people didn't really know about, well possibly
> assembly based too.
> I'm not an expert on Macs, though, just spreading typical mac
> rumors... as it's all closed source anyway, so no one truly knows.
> --
> 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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