1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces. Extremely simplified, the evolution of modern graphical user interfaces goes something like this: The Lisa marked the first modern user interface with windows, icons as objects, menus and mouse input. To this day, these concepts remain essentially unchanged. A person used to Vista or Mac OS X would immediately understand how the Lisa works. Oberon is not part of the «Lisa» line of user interfaces. The following part is based on what people at ETH Zürich have told me and may or may not be true. When ETH Zürich started its own computer science program in the 60s, buying computers from the US turned out to be a bit of an issue. They were expensive and often unsuitable for European use (what with our strange umlauts and stubborn insistence on speaking languages different from English). So ETH Zürich decided to start working on its own hardware and software systems. These projects were based on the Alto Niklaus Wirth