[Oberon] Interfacing with Foreign Systems

[Paul Reed]

Hi Liam,

> ARM is a fairly clean instruction set. The Rasπ design is quite
> simple. And it's £25 and there are literally millions of them out
> there.

Interestingly, the Raspberry Pi was designed at around the same time as 
our effort and the Pi's success then was certainly not at all assured.

I agree it's cheap and handy, and we use it in parts of the System 
Construction course at ETH precisely because of that.

But when we progress to a hands-on case study showing how everything 
works from the ground up, the RISC system running Oberon on the FPGA is 
so much more appropriate.

I am perhaps just in a different place on the "fairly clean" and "quite 
simple" scales than you. ;-)

BTW I do think it's a scandal (but not surprising) that parts of a 
computer targeted at education are under NDA.  But much has been written 
elsewhere about that.  Then again, I don't think even the Micro:bit is 
completely open.  And even that is waaay more complicated than our RISC 
computer, though less powerful.

Cheers,
Paul