Never used it, never knew anyone who used it, never knew anyone who worked on it (though I believe the chair had slots for theses available at the time).
When I started studying, some student pcs were even running Oberon (no login was required). Only some IT students used them as it was too complicated for students from other departments. They were then later replaced with linux/windows machines.
If my memory serves me right, when you bought a laptop through the university neptun program, you had oberon preinstalled too (or at least a dvd to install it) was provided.
As for Bertrand Meyer, I also visited his programming class. I still remember that he really focused on invariants, and you had to write each code line basically twice.
Oh the horror those classes were. Meyer is a great guy, and in hindsight I appreciate his ideas quite a bit. But the idea to take Eiffel for an introductory course, the questionable exercises (being encouraged/forced to write the code twice, once as invariant and once for the actual execution) plus the terrible Eiffel-IDE made those classes very easy to loathe.
And looking back, "I learned to deal with being completely overwhelmed with shitty tools, questioning if the opposite party has any clue what they're talking about, then had to work out how to pass that class" seems like one of the most useful career skills to pick up in your first year.
Who cares about the programming language.
1. "We're going to ask you to build real software, with real tools, in a group. Even if it's only for one course."
2. "We're going to ask you to do some theory and write some proofs."
3. "We're going to show you some wild stuff that looks like it belongs on an alternate timeline."
(3) might be something like Oberon, or Racket, or some eccentric faculty project. Or even just teaching all your CS majors Haskell, if you don't have any genuinely eccentric faculty projects to inflict on students.
Innovation is often driven by people who are aware of what might have been.
We got taught Eiffel Freshman year, C and Haskell Sophomore year, and after that, whenever a course used another language (Java, C#, C++), the prof just said "you'll pick it up".
(That's leaving out the usual-for-academia-but-still-weird stuff like MATLAB and Verilog)
For those that want CS theory only, there is applied mathematics into computation majors.
Do you start more abstract, and if so with functional, imperative or OO underpinnings? Do you intend to switch languages rather soon or later?
The good thing about Oberon, language set aside, is that you could get started without a lot of adminstrative debris. No 80% of the screen covered in an IDE, not even a big ol' "public static void main" that you're told to gloss over.
I can see good arguments for sticking to one language throughout many courses, too. Sadly that often means C++.
That being said, I'm in the same boat as you. I have definitely heard more about Oberon here on HN than at ETHZ.