[Oberon] Windows ETH Oberon

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Chris:

  thank you! I changed the topic because it would be misleading to discuss System 3 under the Linz V4 title.

I installed ETH Oberon. Initially it would not display anything. The process Oberon.EXE would run in the Task Manager, but there was no display. The display started working after I clicked on the oberon.reg in the Oberon directory. I am mentioning this because it happens that BlackBox behaves the same way. It runs and it is visible under Windows Task Manager, but no display. Rebooting Windows solves the BlackBox problem. I thought it was the same with ETH Oberon, but it was not. Rebooting did not help. Clicking on oberon.reg brought the ETH Oberon to life.

The ETH Oberon readme.txt is out of date. It says that ETH Oberon is distributed in 8 packages. However, I downloaded just one .zip file. There were no others on the ETH server. Furthermore, the readme.txt says that Application Packages are available from "http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~zeller/Apps/". This leads to 404 Not Found. Emil Zeller left ETH long time ago, but this should not invalidate the directories. Or perhaps ETH could/should look into the readme.txt and fix it. If the Applications are now part of the download package, why not update the readme.txt accordingly?

At this point I will have to think what to do next. I like Linz V4 and I did quite some programming under V4. It was robust. I also did some work under System 3 and I found the Gadgets message handling to be difficult. I then moved my Gadgets graphics to BlackBox and I found the BlackBox message handling superior to System 3. The difference was that BlackBox uses type-bound message dispatching which is enforced by the compiler and thus rock-solid, while System 3 leaves a lot to the programmer's decisions, which requires discipline and it can never be as robust as the discipline imposed by the compiler. 

On the other hand, System 3 display looks better than V4. No doubt here. 

Another question is support and the community. Who is using what? I feel that in either case there are a handful of users. Which handful is larger? It is a better idea to go with the system which has three active users than the system which has a single user. Is there a list of active users of Linz V4 and System 3? 

I will now look at the SurveyMonkey to organize a poll. I have never done this before...

Thank you,
Wojtek
________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of Chris Burrows [chris at cfbsoftware.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 5, 2017 4:00 PM
To: 'ETH Oberon and related systems'
Subject: Re: [Oberon] Windows Linz V4 white on black

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Skulski, Wojciech [mailto:skulski at pas.rochester.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, 5 November 2017 12:33 PM
> To: chris at cfbsoftware.com; ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: RE: [Oberon] Windows Linz V4 white on black
>
> > ETH Plugin Oberon for Windows
>
> Is it not System-3?

Yes. 'System 3' was renamed to 'ETH Oberon'. I use it because it includes
fixes to Win32.Threads and Win32.Kernel that, as far as I recall, were
released in 2010 to fix problems on more recent versions of Windows.

Also, what is "plugin"? I remember they released
> System-3 running inside Netscape, but Netscape has been long gone. So
> how does this plugin run?
>

It is not a plugin itself - it is just Oberon hosted under Windows. As far
as I can see, the 'plugin' part of the name simply refers to an additional
development capability that it has that enables you to write DLLs that can
be used as 'browser plugins' to extend the functionality of a web browser.

Regards,
Chris Burrows

CFB Software
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