alt Hacker NewsI assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW:
ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans.
But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible.
Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.
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I like how you assumed I’m American because I don’t have knowledge of international top ranking technical schools.
One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Not everybody lives in Europe or has knowledge of what the top technical schools are (which is a bit classist to assume tbh), and this type of Euro-centric thinking doesn’t work very well when communicating with people from other backgrounds.
> even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person
The first sentence of the README says, "This project modernizes the Kernel of Oberon System 3 (version 2.3.7) by migrating it from the original Oberon Boot Loader (OBL, written in assembler) to the Multiboot specification (handled in Oberon directly in the Kernel)."
Armed with that and the headline "Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3", it can be reasonably inferred that "Oberon System 3" is an operating system (shown here of being capable of running on a Raspberry Pi). It doesn't require prior familiarity with Oberon, despite what the previous commenter said.
Neither you nor the original questioner are being particularly rational about this.