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Comment by egfx | Hacker News Reader

Although the zoom idea is cool it’s nothing new. There have been many ui attempts at this like the zenzui ui in 2007. It was a rat race to find the best ui for these emerging devices called smartphones back in the day https://youtu.be/r12eUXJNbl8

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>Although the zoom idea is cool it’s nothing new.

Well, Oberon OS is much older than 2007 tho... More like 1987.

The initial Oberon OS is indeed from 1987, but there are many Oberons. The original Oberon GUI was the everything-is-executable-text one, not the ZUI.

The ZUI was part of Thomas M. Frey's work for his dissertation "Bluebottle : A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI Framework for Active Oberon" [2] (Bluebottle OS) submitted in 2005.

This was built on top of Pieter J. Muller's work for his dissertation "The Active Object System" [1] (AOS) submitted in 2002.

There are many more ETH (PhD and student) projects based on Oberon before and after (ARM Oberon, WinOberon, UnixOberon, Oberon.NET, ...) mainly in Jürg Gutknecht's group.

[1] https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/... [2] https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/...

Thanks, this is really helpful! Since there seems to be no central point of information on the myriad versions of oberon and no official website at eth anymore, it's really hard to get the lay of the land and find out which version does what and why.

You can have some additional info here, include lots of nice screenshots.

https://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compil...

In a couple of years, all Oberon related knowledge will be left collecting dust in university libraries and digital archives.

There is an active project to document Oberon (both language and OS, in its various versions) on Wikibooks: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon

I personally am intermittently working on the Wikipedia articles for Oberon (language and OS) and Bluebottle OS.

Contributions, links etc. very welcome.

Thanks for the heads up.

I can gladly contribute the screenshots I took while using A2.

...and A2 was perfectly positioned to be used as a smartphone OS instead of Android (2007)- compiled modules with GC, multithreaded ZUI etc in 2005. It's a shame really but I guess developer familiarity trumps architecture:(

The zoomable UI idea dates back to at least the 70's.

Here's one variant [1]. That said, it's a design space that is poorly explored with plenty of room for different variants.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040959/dataland-mits-70s...

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