Bluebottle OS

Bluebottle (formerly known as Active Object System, AOS, and more recently as A2) is a modular, object-oriented operating system. Originally developed at ETH Zurich, it has some unconventional features, including automatic, garbage-collected memory management and a zooming user interface.

A2
DeveloperETH Zurich
OS familyA2
Working stateCurrent
Source modelOpen source
Repository
PlatformsIA-32, x86-64, ARM, Cell
LicenseBSD-like ETH A2 License[1]
Official websitehttp://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/

History

A2 is the next generation of Native Oberon, the x86 PC version of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon operating system.[2][3][4] It is small, fast, supports multiprocessor computers, and provides soft real-time operation. It is entirely written in an upward-compatible dialect of the Oberon programming language called Active Oberon. Oberon and Active Oberon are members of the Pascal family, along with Modula-2.

A2's design allows the development of efficient systems based on active objects which run directly on the hardware. These active objects represent a combination of the traditional OOPS notion of an object combined with a thread that executes in the context of that object. In the Active Oberon implementation, the active object may include, in addition to its own activity, the activity of its ancestor objects.

Other differences between A2 and more mainstream operating systems is an extremely minimalistic design, completely implemented in a type-safe language with automatic memory management, combined with a powerful and flexible set of primitives (at the level of programming language and runtime system) for synchronisation of access to the internal properties of objects in competing execution contexts.

Above the kernel layer, A2 provides a flexible collection of modules providing unified abstractions for devices and services, such as file systems, user interfaces, network connections, media codecs, etc.

User interface

Bluebottle OS replaces the older Oberon OS's unique TUI with a zooming user interface or ZUI, which is significantly more like conventional graphical user interfaces. Like Oberon, though, its user interface supports a "point-and-click" metaphor to execute commands directly from text, similar to clicking hyperlinks in a browser.

See also

References
  1. "License". Archived from the original on 2012-08-07. Retrieved 2014-01-07.
  2. Wirth, Niklaus; Gutknecht, Jürg (September 1989). "The Oberon System". Software: Practice and Experience. 19 (9): 857–893. doi:10.1002/spe.4380190905.
  3. Reiser, Martin (1992). The Oberon System: User Guide and Programmer's Manual. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-54422-9.
  4. Wirth, Niklaus; Gutknecht, Jürg (1992). Project Oberon - The Design of an Operating System and Compiler. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-54428-8.. Out of print. Electronic Reprint.
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