The ETH Active Object System (AOS), also known as Bluebottle, was the successor of the ETH Oberon System 3. It was written in the Active Oberon programming language, which extended original Oberon by monitor-based concurrency.
For more information about the system, see
- The Active Object System - Design and Multiprocessor Implementation (2002)
- Using Oberon’s Active Objects for Language Interoperability and Compilation (2003)
- Bluebottle: A Thread-safe Multimedia and GUI Framework for Active Oberon (2005)
This repository includes the source code of the last stable release of the ETH AOS/Bluebottle System, dated March 12, 2004, in plain ISO 8859-1 UTF-8 text files.
The following ZIP files with the source code have been downloaded from the archived bluebottle.ethz.ch website on 2023-12-29.
- AosSysSrc.zip, 83 Mod, latest 2004-03-12T14:14
- AosDefs.zip, 2 Def, latest 2003-02-26T14:38
- AosAppsSrc.zip, 216 Mod, latest 2004-03-12T11:53
- AosOberonSrc.zip, 94 Mod, latest 2004-03-09T11:05
- AosGadSrc.zip, 111 Mod, latest 2004-03-12T14:13
- AosOberonAppsSrc.zip, 131 Mod, latest 2004-02-06T11:40
The files have been converted from the proprietary Oberon to plain UTF-8 format using tools from here.
The last archive snapshot of the bluebottle.ethz.ch website was on 2011-05-24. In the next snapshot by 2011-07-06, the name "Bluebottle" was replaced by "A2". Already starting from the 2009-04-01 archive snapshot, the download menu pointed to the A2 Revision 2081 (February 19, 2009). Finally, in 2014 the website bluebottle.ethz.ch didn't exist any longer, but was redirected to a2.ethz.ch.
The release downloaded here was accessible from the bluebottle.ethz.ch website in unchanged form until at least 2008-06-12, under the Download Current link. Also the referenced change log ends on 2004-03-12.
There were some later releases called "Crazy-Fresh", described as "Never tested, never booted but as fresh as it can be"; the latest one from 2007-07-23 can be accessed from here. The CrazyFresh branch of this repository can be used for comparison with the stable 2004 release.
By the end of 2005, the main contributors of the AOS/Bluebottle system (Pieter Johannes Muller, Patrik Reali and Thomas Martin Frey) were no longer at ETH, which is likely the reason why there was no later "Current" release.
Please also note that the ETH Active Object/Bluebottle system discussed here is not the same as the A2 operating system. The latter was implemented by different people using a different programming language (which is based on, but different from Active Oberon). A2 can be seen as a successor of the ETH Active Object/Bluebottle system, since it reuses and extends parts of the existing code, but it also has a different focus, more on mathematical features.