Niklaus Wirth created Oberon as a successor to Pascal and published it in 1988.
Wirth developed Oberon at ETH Zurich with the goal of producing a simpler, more efficient language for the Oberon operating system and related computer projects. Compared with Pascal and Modula-2, Oberon removed or simplified several features while retaining structured programming and strong typing.
Oberon introduced a compact language design with records that could be extended, a feature supporting object-oriented techniques without adopting a large class system. Its small size made it useful for teaching, systems work, and implementation experiments.
Oberon is often confused with Modula-2 because both were designed by Wirth and both followed Pascal. Modula-2 was published earlier, in 1978, while Oberon belongs to a later generation of Wirth’s language designs.