[Oberon] Fwd: Re: 30th anniversary of Oberon

[rochus.keller at bluewin.ch]

Amendment:

[31] points to N. Wirth, "Designing a System from Scratch." Structured Programming, 10, 1 (Jan. 1989), pp. 10-18.
which I unfortunately don't have.

The first publication of the Oberon System apparently was in July 1988 (see https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-000487176). It states on page 3:
"In late 1985, the authors started a project with the goal to develop an operating environment [...]
After 30 months of intensive programming, a highly flexible and reliable tool is operational, and this is a
summarizing report on both the project and the product called Oberon."

So the handed down start date of the project Oberon is 1985.

Best
R.


----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----
Von : rochus.keller at bluewin.ch
Datum : 04/01/2020 - 10:30 (CET)
An : oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
Betreff : Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon

@  Chris Burrows

Thanks for the information. There seems to be a contradiction with "The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III)" (2007, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1411838) which states on page 3-8:

"The first ideas leading to Oberon were drafted in 1985, and the
language was fully defined in early 1986 in close cooperation
with J. Gutknecht. The report was only 16 pages long [28].
[...] The
entire system was programmed by Gutknecht and the author as a
spare time activity over more than two years as described in [31].
The system was released in 1989".

[28] points to "The Programming Language Oberon", Software - Practice and
Experience, 18, 7 (July 1988), pp. 671-690.

That's one of the reasons why usually official publication dates are used, such as the 1987 https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-005363226.

Best
R.


_______________________________
From: Chris Burrows
Sent on: Sat, 04 Jan 2020 05:55:52 +0100
To: ETH Oberon and related systems
Cc: 
Subject: Re: [Oberon] 30th anniversary of Oberon

2011 wasn't the birthday of the Oberon language (report / compiler / implementation / whatever) - it was the anniversary of the start of Project Oberon.

"Programming was started in early 1986, and a first version of the system was released in the fall of 1988". (Project Oberon - The Design of an Operating System and Compiler)

Regards,
Chris Burrows
https://www.astrobe.com