Oberon System V4

TITLE

Oberon System V4 for Amiga

VERSION

1.2

AUTHOR

Stefan Ludwig, Claudio Nieder, Ralf Degner

E-Mail: ludwig@inf.ethz.ch, degner@pallas.amp.uni-hannover.de

S-Mail: Stefan Ludwig
        Institut fuer Computersysteme
        ETH-Zentrum
        CH-8092 Zuerich

DESCRIPTION

Oberon System V4 for Amiga (O4A) is a full implementation of ETH Zurich's
Oberon System V4.

Oberon is both a programming language and an operating system developed by
Prof.  N.  Wirth and Prof.  J.  Gutknecht.

The Oberon System in key words:
 - Single-process multitasking
 - Garbage collector - memory will be released automatically if
   not needed anymore
 - Commandos: procedures that can be called like programs
 - Dynamic loading: modules are loaded and linked to the system
   during run-time (if necessary)
 - Text as a built-in abstract data type (for example a
   Minesweeper game as a letter (like OLE and OpenDOC))
 - Graphical user interface

A special advantage is the very high compatibility of the systems between
implementations on different computers.  System V4 implementations exist
for Amiga, Mac, Power Mac, Windows (NT), Linux, IBM-RS6000, Sun-Sparc,
HP-Workstations, NeXt, ...  You can use a program written on one
implementation on any other without change.

O4A is a full implementation of the Oberon System V4 with all usual
programs.  The system runs in its own task and therefore you can use O4A
and the Amiga OS at the same time.  Specific features of the Amiga
implementation are its incremental heap allocation, support of the Amiga
clipboard and the capability of accessing IFF files.

The O4A package contains:
 - A full Oberon-2 compiler
 - Development tools (Browser, Analyzer, Disassembler, ...)
 - XE, a comfortable 'editor' with layout functions
 - Kepler, an object-oriented 2D vector drawing program
 - Paint, a simple pixel-oriented paint program
 - A lot of additional tools (Draw, RX, AsciiCoder, ...)
 - Various text elements
 - VT100 terminal emulation
 - Games: Tetris and Minesweeper (with source)
 - Example sources and online documentation

To get more information about the programming language and operating system
Oberon have a look at the "Oberon and Amiga" WWW page:
http://sun1.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/~nhbidegn/oa-e.html There you will find
links to other Oberon information resources.

NEW FEATURES

- Problems with > 16 colors fixed
- New Text-Elements
- New docu (ReferenceCars.ps, Prog.Guide.Text, ....)
- Several bugs fixes
- Dialogs.lha     - advanced GUI and very nice programming example
- Expressions.lha - mathematical expressions within text documents
- and many, many more (see Release.Notes.Text)

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

- Amiga with OS2.0 or higher
- at least an MC68020
- a minimum of 1.5 MB free memory (2.5 MB recommended)
- about 3 MB disk space
- FPU for floating point calculations
  (without FPU Oberon-NonFPU.lha is required)

AVAILABILITY

The Home of Oberon is the ETH Zurich.  There you can find many Oberon
System implementations, especially the Amiga version:

ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/Oberon/Amiga/V1.2/

Oberon.lha (1.1 MB)        - main archive
Oberon-NonFPU.lha (100 KB) - to use O4A without FPU
Oberon-Src.lha (700 KB)    - the full source of O4A
Oberon-Fonts.lha (390 KB)  - additional fonts
Dialogs.lha (250kB)        - advanced GUI
Expressions.lha (130kB)    - math expressions within text documents

It is available in the Aminet directory dev/obero, too.

PRICE

It's free, but not PD.
Please note the ReadMe file in every archive. 

DISTRIBUTABILITY

Oberon System V4 for Amiga is (C)opyright 1990-96 by Claudio Nieder, Stefan
Ludwig, Ralf Degner and the Institute for Computer Systems ETH Zurich. 
Some files in the archives are (C)opyright by other persons (for example
Dialogs and Expressions).

All files in the archives are freeware.  You can use it in any way you like
but you must not include part of it in a commercial product.

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