Oberon and the Oberon Companion

My work in user interfaces involved the design and implementation of the Gadgets document-based user interface for Oberon System 3. I was also involved with the design and implementation of Oberon System 3 with Jürg Gutknecht and many others. I am the original distributor of the Spirit of Oberon distribution for Windows 3.1/95/NT, although I handed the job to Emil Zeller in March 1996.

The image on the right is the cover of a book titled The Oberon Companion (ISBN 3-7281-2493-1) by Andre Fischer and myself. The book is a user and programming guide for Oberon System 3, with particular emphasis on the Gadgets user interface. The book is targeted at readers with Oberon programming experience. A CD-ROM with Windows 95/NT, Linux, PowerMac, 68K Mac, and Native PC implementations of the system is included with the book (the software can also be downloaded from the ETH Oberon page). Especially interesting is the Native PC version of Oberon System 3, where Oberon is the operating system itself (no underlying operating system is needed). Also included on the CD-ROM you will find many internet applications, end-user applications and even a suite of games -- with commented Oberon source code. Oberon contains everything you might need --- in fact, students at the Institute for Computersystems at ETH often use Oberon exclusively from start to finish during their studies.

An interesting factoid is that the book was type-set completely with Oberon itself. We wrote the book with the System 3 document editor (a semi-WYSIWYG editor I wrote). A custom type-setting program (written in Oberon) made the final conversion to a postscript file for the publisher. The formatting included adding headers, footers, hyphenation, table of contents, index, etc. Only cover was designed by the publisher (the background is a picture of Oberon, one of the moons of Uranus).

Another interesting factoid is that the Windows, PowerMac, 68K Mac, and Linux versions of Oberon System 3 share the same object code. This is made possible by the use of slim binaries, a technique invented by Michael Franz to generate machine code on-the-fly while Oberon modules are loaded. This results in truely portable programs without performance penalties.

Ordering information. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher: