Plan 9's UI works in a quite similar way. I'm not up to date on my history of those systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is heavy cross pollination between the two.
Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...
That would be awesome to see on a modern tablet device. The gesture interface already exists and people are accustomed to it. It would be neat to see a demo of it at least.
Thinking about it, while not implemented for the whole experience, are there any apps that do this?
To some extent Safari on OS X does this now (since what version, I'm not sure). While you can zoom in and around a page, you can also zoom out when the page is at 100% and get a view of all the open tabs. iPad with its multitasking control is similar (swipe up with 4 fingers to see all tasks, tap on one to switch to it). A photo app would, as demonstrated, be an appropriate use, same with the calendar. Instead of having to hit buttons to move up the hierarchy allow the users to pinch-to-zoom instead.
The text and GUI integration describes exactly why I fell in love with Linux. There is a GUI, but I will be damned if there are things (save some terrible GNOME cruft from personal experience) that cannot be facilitated the terminal commands and scripting. Around the same time in college as I discovered Linux and began really exploring, I started a sysadmin gig at school maintaining Winboxen, and the inability to script a lot of core stuff (this was before Powershell, but my opinion is little has changed beyond "this is the crap Microsoft thinks you should automate") is incredibly frustrating and what drove me to admire the utilitarian approach of Linux and other UNIX environments so so much. That is why Linux, *BSD, and even in a small way OS X make me really happy.
Oberon seems to harmonize both. That is very cool, and definitely would be an OS of choice for me.
Apple was one of the my first computers; I am familiar with the OS 1 - 9 line. That being said I was a child and I am not too familiar after all these years if they were like it.
When dealing with a current Mac, people look at me weird as I spend my time in only two apps: Console.app and Terminal.app. And people wonder why I bitch how Apple bastardized Unix (and to the fanbois: I know it is just as much BSD's fault, get off my lawn).
Oberon was the programming language and environment used to teach first year programming classes at the university of antwerp when I studied there back in the late 90's. I ended up using it as my main programming environment for months at a time. There was a definite learning curve because of the weird mouse approach. They used mouse behavior that I haven't seen anywhere else, like interclicks (chorded mouse button click combinations). Mostly though there were keyboard alternatives, like ctrl-enter for middle click, so you didn't have to have the mouse in hand all the time. Once the learning curve was over I remember finding the keyboard/mouse behavior quite efficient, though you did need a three-button mouse to make full use of it.
I initially had a negative reaction to the clunky appearance of oberon and the weird conventions, but grew to like it quite a bit over the course of the year. It was really a programmer's OS, because there was essentially no difference between documents, programs and user interfaces. You could look at any application and decompose it into its building blocks and program code quite easily because "view source" was an intrinsic part of the system. The downside was that it didn't actually do much, given that there was basically no way to port existing software so it ran inside the oberon environment. Had it somehow gained the ability to run other programming languages than Oberon within the same UI paradigm it might have been quite popular as a geek OS.
Not only that, for me it showed me that it is possible to have operating systems implemented in GC enabled systems programming languages, contrary to what C guys keeping on preaching.
Native Oberon System 3 was quite an improvement with the Gadgets interface.
I think only by experimenting such operating systems, in a similar way to Lisp and Smalltalk machines, one can be convinced of the viability of GC enabled languages at the OS level.
Sadly, most efforts that came after Oberon don't offer much more than a plain CLI, thus reinforcing the common belief that GC enabled systems programming languages are not viable for OS development.
We lost a lot in computing by having just the UNIX/C model as the only one to follow.
So every time I see these threads about classic computing systems that did something interesting or novel (Oberon, Plan 9 Symbolics OpenGenera, BeOS, Amiga, etc), I want to be able to try them out on my own machine.
After discovering that OpenGenera was available, I tried a bunch to find a way to run it in a VM in OS X and had no luck finding an Alpha virtual machine host on which to install it.
Is Oberon one of those systems that I can get up and running in a virtual machine on OS X in an afternoon?
And if you feel like to research how Oberon was implemented, the language, the kernel level GC and all the rest, there are lots of information available here,
The VLM's been ported, but manually setting it up Sid by far and large the same amount of pain simply amortized over time: the guides extant say you'll have to set up NTP, allow for a TUN from a hard coded IP to be granted an NFS export to the entirety of your disk, and - well, that's where I've ended up and I've still got an inscrutable "No protocol specified" to bang my head against. Perhaps serendipity'll be better to you.
I still remember the days when we had those Oberon machines (not yet bluebottle) at the computer rooms at the ETHZ. Nobody touched them except the computer science students. You didn't even needed a login to use them, just a mouse with 3 buttons for the famous interclick to execute commands! :)
This part is the most exciting to me. - "obsoletes the idea of opening a document. Essentially, all documents can be open all the time. All you have to do to interact with one is to zoom in close enough."
It's a bit silly to claim that outside of Oberon, all modern graphical UIs are descended from the Lisa. Unix and its many variations were very active in the early 1980s, and there were non-Lisa sophisticated window systems emerging around the same time as the Apple Lisa.
I remember seeing Oberon in the late 1980s, running on a Sun workstation which supported the SunView and X10 - simultaneously (at the time, we'd figured out how to run SunView in the color buffer and X10 in the overlay buffer, configured to be a separate virtual screen). In those three environments, I feel little could be ascribed to the Lisa, but much to PARC.
Considering the bit about different European languages, it seems really strange that words would become links to applications. Sending instructions on how to do something from your home in <latin character set country> to your Russian aunt? Better know the Cyrillic version of what you want to launch.
Snark aside, there are some interesting aspects to that; I really like the idea of simple launcher lists, even if it means you have to know the names of everything you want to launch. I teach some kids with dyslexia and I can imagine trying to do this in a classroom environment.
I remember giving Oberon a try in the late 90's. As I recall, Oberon was available as both an application and as a stand-alone OS.
I really liked the interface of both Oberon and Plan 9. I wasn't really able to get much done with them back then, as I was a real novice, but I did find the UI attractive.
Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...
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The article linked to at the very beginning is not available on the original site. Here is an archive.org link: http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tum...