The Web Site to Remember National Semiconductor's Series 32000 Family

Oberon

Oberon is the operating system of the Ceres family of computers. Oberon and Ceres were developed at the ETH Zürich by Professor N. Wirth in the 1980's. He wrote a book about Oberon which contained the source code of it. A copy of it can be found in the internet.

The concept behind Obereon is very interesting. Oberon was from the beginning based on a graphical user interface (GUI) with a high-resolution black-and-white screen and a mouse interface. Don't forget that most computer interfaces of that time were text based, e.g. DOS or Terminal. Despite its capabilities Oberon was very compact and fits in 128 kbytes memory.

What I have is the EPROM content of two Ceres-3 machines. Surprisingly they are different. Together with the description of the Ceres-3 it should be possible to rebuild such a system based on the M32632 CPU. This will be a nice project to do.

Update of September 2023

The text above was written in March 2016. Now TRIPUTER emulates Ceres-3 - see it at Systems/TRIPUTER.

What I have learned about Oberon is that the development was very dynamic. The two versions I have are very different. For example there are different editors. And also that some strange decisions were made, i.e. that the cursor keys up and down were not functioning. In the beginning of Oberon Professor Wirth even didn't want cursor keys at all...

This chapter was last modified on 17 September 2023. Next chapter: PanOS