[Oberon] Unlimited Oberon System for any board

[Frans-Pieter Vonck]

I remember the presentation of jpl.
Oberonday 2011
https://ethz.ch/content/vp/en/conferences/2011/oberon/b5c33d4b-1a6d-4739-9a70-bdf9313a8643.html
Oberon at 19:50

Greets,
F.P.

Jan de Kruyf schreef op 2020-05-08 09:37:
> Chris,
> Sorry to disappoint you but no rocket scientist is ever going to touch
> Oberon, not even with a bargepole.
> In the rare case they know Oberon they laugh very loudly and ask:
> "Which Oberon?".
> 
> And I? Well I think I will just carry on using Ada and perhaps Linux
> for my hobby projects. It's a bit of an overkill, but then it works,
> it has the rich environment, and in the case of Ada it has the speed
> and the security, and I know both well.
> 
> By the way I did enjoy reading through some of the stuff on your
> website. You did a good job for Oberon.
> 
> J.
> 
> On Fri, 8 May 2020, 02:13 Chris Burrows, <chris at cfbsoftware.com>
> wrote:
> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf
>> Of
>>> Skulski, Wojciech
>>> Sent: Thursday, 7 May 2020 11:01 PM
>>> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
>>> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Unlimited Oberon System for any board
>>> 
>>> Joerg:
>>> 
>>>> In this discussion, I miss a little bit the SW cost..
>>> 
>>> Do you mean Linux, which is free, or Oberon System, which is also
>> free?
>>> 
>>> Or do you mean the cost of software development by *ourselves*,
>> which
>>> somehow was not ever mentioned in this discussion? There was a lot
>> of
>>> attention devoted to which SBC is cheaper. Somehow, nobody in this
>>> discussion said: "I bought $5 computer, and I spent NNN hours
>> getting a
>>> project ABC running. Since my time is worth XXX dollars per hour,
>> the
>>> total cost was $5 + XXX * NNN." We mostly argue about $5 or $50
>> per
>>> board. Of course we lean towards $5. Who cares about XXX * NNN?
>>> 
>> 
>> That sums up why we should not be concerned about what a hobbyist
>> (as
>> opposed to a professional engineer or scientist) is prepared to pay
>> for a
>> development board to support the Project Oberon operating system.
>> The system
>> is much more suited to professionals who value their time and are
>> more
>> interested in building solutions. Many hobbyists seem to get some
>> sort of
>> devious pleasure from the satisfaction of finally getting a blinker
>> program
>> working after spending many weeks cobbling together ten different
>> versions
>> of ten different tools from ten different sources. They typically
>> have the
>> attention span of a goldfish. Once their development system is ready
>> to go
>> and they could start doing some really interesting creative
>> development work
>> they get bored and start looking for something else to do.
>> 
>> I get it. I have an occasional hobbyist interest in vintage
>> electronics.
>> Recently I restored a 4-valve (a.k.a. 4-tube) 1946 domestic radio
>> set. Most
>> of the enjoyment in the exercise was derived from visiting a Sunday
>> morning
>> sale of the local Historical Radio Society, which led to a trip to
>> the
>> Adelaide Hills where I met a guy who has a collection of 50,000
>> valves (all
>> carefully packaged and catalogued) in two containers. I also tracked
>> down a
>> supplier in the USA to get the replacement vintage grill cloth and
>> other
>> bits and pieces. The whole exercise, including restoring the wooden
>> cabinet,
>> took a couple of months and cost a few hundred dollars. Imagine what
>> that
>> would have cost if I had employed a professional to do it.
>> 
>> Now the radio is working do I listen to it? Of course not. It was
>> the
>> 'journey not the destination' that I was interested in. Added to the
>> fact I
>> was unable to receive authentic radio broadcasts from the 1940's on
>> it - my
>> next project is going to be a time machine ;-)
>> 
>> I believe the best target new audience for the Oberon language and
>> Project
>> Oberon is the professional electronics engineer or rocket scientist
>> who
>> doesn't enjoy programming for the sake of it but regards it as a
>> necessary
>> evil to get a job done. Personally, I don't use Project Oberon as my
>> development environment and have no interest in seeing it run on a
>> credit-card sized PC. Instead I view it as a brilliant working
>> example to
>> prove what can be achieved using the Oberon Language on
>> resource-limited
>> hardware. Having said that, it is not just an academic exercise. I
>> see
>> enormous potential in the use of the realtime Project Oberon
>> operating
>> system kernel as an alternative RTOS to whatever else is currently
>> out
>> there. However, to fully exploit and extend its capabilities it is
>> necessary
>> to have real FPGA hardware available to run it on. I'm currently
>> working
>> hard to try and make that happen,
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Chris
>> 
>> Chris Burrows
>> CFB Software
>> https://www.astrobe.com/RISC5
>> 
>> --
>> 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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