Component Pascal is a strongly typed, compiled language that supports modular and object-oriented programming and Eiffel-like pre- and post-condition testing using ASSERT statements.

According to a posting[11] of Clemens Szyperski on Usenet news Oberon/F and in turn BlackBox Component Builder is a re-implementation of ETHOS, which was completely object-oriented version of the Oberon System, which he had implemented for his PhD thesis.

Some of these tools can be integrated from the community platforms (see external links below, e.g. syntax highlighting can be found in subsystem Master).

Similar to most BASIC dialects and Oberon implementations source code files are binary documents.

The Linux version was never released publicly by Oberon microsystems, although OpenBUGS a software package for the Bayesian analysis of complex statistical models using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods based its Linux version on it.

In 2002, Pepperdine University professor Stanley Warford[14] published a book that teaches computing fundamentals via BlackBox.