This TUI was very innovative in its time and influenced the design of the Acme text editor for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.

[8] The Oberon System was later extended and ported to other hardware platforms[9][10][11][12][13] by a team at ETH Zurich and there was recognition in popular magazines.

[14] [15][16][17][18][19] Wirth and Gutknecht (although being active computer science professors) refer to themselves as 'part-time programmers' in the book Project Oberon.

[20] It details implementing the Oberon System using a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU of his own design realized on a Xilinx field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board.

[22][23][24][25][26] According to Josef Templ, a former member of the developer group at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and later member of the Institut für Systemsoftware of Johannes Kepler University Linz, where one forked version (V4) was maintained, the genealogy of the different versions of the Oberon System is this: Oberon has a text user interface (TUI), which is very different from a terminal user interface.

V4 used for that purpose a dedicated control character embedded in normal text in contrast to System 3, which extended the kernel by introducing persistent objects.

The whole book is available in electronic form under a one user license in every installed version of System 3 (Windows, Linux, or Native, i.e., also with the Gadgets toolkit of OLR[33]).

Rob Pike's Acme system for Plan 9 from Bell Labs was strongly inspired by the Oberon TUI.

As foreshadowed in the table in section History above, there was a major fork in the early 1990s: V4 vs. System 3: The group around Jürg Gutknecht introduced persistent objects and object-libraries thereby extending the kernel.

The group around Hanspeter Mössenböck realized similar features by introducing active elements mapped to a special character thereby extending fonts without changing the kernel.

Even with an Oberon compiler, assorted utilities including a web browser, TCP/IP networking, and a GUI, the full package can be compressed to one 3.5" floppy disk.

The approach of a compressed abstract syntax tree for portable code representation is revived in the Java world for GraalVM and Truffle.

The version named Oberon V4 (see also History) is closer to the original operating system developed by Wirth and Gutknecht.

There were many extensions written for V4, which are still available from the ftp server of SSW at JKU; some documentation can be found on their web-pages, more information is normally included in the packages and it is given in Oberon's special rich text format.

Versions which execute as programs under other operating systems are available on Windows (WinAos), Unix (UnixAos), Linux (LinuxAos), and macOS (DarwinAos).

It is intended for uses such as real-time analytics, financial applications, main memory based enterprise resource planning (ERP), etc.

Other versions of the Oberon System, without Native in the name, had partly modified interfaces of low level modules.

In 2015, Peter Matthias revitalized LNO under the name Oberon Linux Revival (OLR)[33] as a multi-platform distribution running seamlessly on Intel x86, ARM, MIPS, and RISC-V.

In 2013, Wirth and Paul Reed completed a re-implementation of the original Oberon System for the Digilent Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA Starter Board.

In 2015, Reed collaborated with Victor Yurkovsky to create OberonStation, a Xilinx Spartan 3-based computer designed specifically to run Oberon.