7 ms·

Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened

390 points by rdmuser 2mo ago

ColdStream 2mo ago
I think it is like most software, especially in the OS space. The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that. And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. Amiga couldn't over come the PC. IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2. Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium. Luck and market forces from said luck played a huge part in determining who won.
- specproc 2mo ago
  > The report stated that the US had concerns about Japanese government market intervention to support the TRON OS and identified two specific markets where TRON was receiving government advantage. The US government is one hell of a moat.
  - childintime 2mo ago
    The financial center of the world selects its winners nearby. As simple as that. Businesses outside of the US have never had much of a chance. China does the same now, as the engineering center of the world. And they have to because the financial center is hyping them as a threat.
    - bulbar 2mo ago
      A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance. That's not "hype".
      - otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
        You're confusing "ally" and "vassal". Allies are countries that send troops to help you in war.
        tremon 2mo ago
        Whereas vassals are countries that you draft to help you in war?
        mr_toad 2mo ago
        Yes, by definition, a vassal owes allegiance to their lord, which includes military service. But you can’t really take a feudal term and apply it to modern politics. Taiwan doesn’t resemble a vassal in any meaningful way.
        Calazon 2mo ago
        I think the idea is that a vassal state (operates as though it) owes allegiance to a stronger state, while governing itself (more or less) independently. And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states. Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.
        specproc 2mo ago
        So many dead lads from both my countries fighting American wars, for zero gain to our peoples. That's vassalship, not an alliance.
        deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
        OroPla 2mo ago
        Allies will only help you if you are winning the war. Vassals will also help if you are losing.
        2mo ago
      - roenxi 2mo ago
        On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself. People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.
        pjc50 2mo ago
        > why we keep hitting the Russians 1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with Russian forces yet, despite persistent incursions into EU airspace and occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe. The UK is developing special US ITAR-free missiles for this purpose: https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Long-Range-Cruise-Missile-Prototypes-for-Ukraine-Under-Project-Brakestop/ https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Lo... 2) "start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable": I think we're past the point of pretending that international law applies evenly, and back to Mao's "power comes out of the barrel of a gun". If we go back to a Cold War multipolar world between China, the US, Europe, and Russia, the only one of those which hasn't made public statements threatening European territorial integrity is China. (at this point I would expect India to start asking whether they get to be a world power or not and what they're going to do with that, too)
        roenxi 2mo ago
        > since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now? The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border. This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked. Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.
      - chabska 2mo ago
        Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution. (P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)
        pjc50 2mo ago
        The UK PM change happened indirectly as a result of poor performance in the local elections. It does actually matter that the UK has multiple parties that effectively compete, even if some of them are blatantly sockpuppets for overseas millionaires.
        Lio 2mo ago
        That's because in the time since Xi took over China there's been 7 different UK Prime Ministers, most of whom were kicked out of office before their term ended. In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
        chabska 2mo ago
        Why are we using British PM count like it means anything. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel served longer as Kanzler than Xi has served as President. Is Germany a dictatorship? (Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)
        Lio 2mo ago
        The point is that PM count proves it was possible for other people to remove serving PMs from power. They were not able to ignore public opinion indefinitely and could be removed from power without the need for term limits. No one can remove Xi from power if they don't like the way he performs. No one in China can even publicly discuss his performance except to praise him. That's what makes China a dictatorship and the UK a democracy.
      - ben_w 2mo ago
        > A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance. I think it's a safe bet that China will invade precisely when they think this won't cause them severe negative losses. This will likely be when Taiwan finds itself no longer a close ally of the USA, nor of global geostrategic importance. Of course, "safe bet" doesn't mean "in all possible timelines"; they may end up echoing the Bay of Pigs, Hormuz, or stumble against the hubris that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand into a world war where all belligerents had the mistaken belief they would win.
      - juusto 2mo ago
        The "dicatorship" of China never implemented such a thing in my country. USA "democracy" did.
      - kshri24 2mo ago
        I don't like China for how it is behaving with my country but it is rich to talk about "invasions" when all the invading in the past half a century has been done by a Sole Democratic Superpower and its lackeys. Cannot believe I am having to defend China here but here we are!
        Paradigma11 2mo ago
        [dead]
    - expedition32 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    - conductr 2mo ago
      It’s also just less risky and easier to work with people that you are near, speak your language, etc. more so back in the 80s before most people were even using email, we Americans had virtually no contact with people on other continents even was limited in the business world.
      - childintime 2mo ago
        I wholeheartedly agree. Even China integrated. It's not where the rift comes from.
- krige 2mo ago
  > Amiga couldn't over come the PC. For reasons that had nothing to do with OS. Swap Steve Jobs with Irving Gould and Apple would be dead in under a decade too.
  - kalleboo 2mo ago
    Tramiel left Commodore in 1984 after battling Gould and Jobs left Apple in 1985 after battling Sculley. Apple then went on to have terrible management for over a decade, with people like Michael Spindler trying their best to run the company into the ground. Apple only survived as long as they did since they had really fat margins on their machines so e.g. the Apple II could subsidize the Macintosh for years. Commodore's focus on low cost made it a lot more difficult for them to e.g. fund the evolution of the Amiga properly.
- tonyhart7 2mo ago
  apparently China decision to ban US tech company and build their own counterpart is seen as Genius after 20 years
  - arkh 2mo ago
    One of the advantages of an autocracy: you don't need people's approval every 5 years so you can plan for decades. When you're right it is awesome. When you're wrong, well that's what the army is for.
    - tonyhart7 2mo ago
      You can badmouth about China all you want but at least they are consistent where they stand while US flip flopping about invading middle east (like usual) or Greenland
      - hvb2 2mo ago
        I don't think he was badmouthing China at all. He's basically using different words to make the exact same point you're trying to make. When there's no real accountability, in a reasonable timeframe, it's much easier to plan long term. It's the same within companies. When the CEO assumes he'll be around for 5 years, should he shoot for the 10 year goal and reduce outcomes in the early years? Or does he just optimize for the next 5 years, thereby neglecting the long term goal?
        tonyhart7 2mo ago
        "When you're wrong, well that's what the army is for." he is implying that China bad action can be solved by PL red Army
        fc417fc802 2mo ago
        He's not implying, he stated it directly. If you think he's wrong then tell me - what do you believe would happen there in the event of widespread social unrest or grievances against the sitting government?
- close04 2mo ago
  > it just needs to get lucky enough to To not compete with something from a country which sees its interests threatened and has the power to squeeze you dry. The US intervention to apply pressure handed a weapon to an internal player, Masayoshi Son who just happened to make money selling US software. He used that weapon against his and US' competition. It's a playbook that the US used again and again when it saw its interests threatened by competition: hit the enemy hard below the belt while handing weapons to another internal player who will also hit the enemy below the belt. Every other example you gave came from inside the US, even from the same company with multiple products. The market played the defining role there and pushed for survival of the fittest. In TRON's case "market forces" turned out to be US intervention.
- Aperocky 2mo ago
  Is it luck or bold product and marketing decision? Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight.
- shevy-java 2mo ago
  > The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that. I don't know about that. Top 500 supercomputers running Linux. I use both Linux and Win10, for instance (won't switch to Win11 no matter what), but whenever I have to use Windows, I wonder how this garbage could ever become so dominating in the first place. Inefficiency is very clearly a work culture at Microsoft; I notice this every time I copy data. And then wingers for Windows babble about how Microsoft does so much more behind the scenes - all of which is totally pointless. It is such an utter trash operating system, so I can not agree with "it it is ok to suck" statements. I much prefer solid engineering at all times.
  - jdw64 2mo ago
    But the idea that Windows is a "better OS" really seems accurate for people in the Third World. This is because Korean language support on Linux is terrible, and since all the commands are in English, it takes quite a bit of time to get used to it. Not only that, but there are so many distributions that you do not even know what to configure, and rather than doing RTFM, I just want to get my "work" done. In that regard, I honestly think Linux is better once you master it, but realistically, Windows is much more casual and practical. You might disagree, but for people outside the Anglosphere, Windows is far more casual. To be completely honest, the vast majority of people do not even like looking at PowerShell or terminal windows. It is familiar to programmers like us, but honestly, I do not like looking at terminal windows either. I would much rather look at an IDE. In the English speaking Linux world, you just map ASCII, but we need things like ibus or fcitx. On top of that, there have been CJK input method fragmentation and conflict issues for over 20 years. I think this gap exists because they cannot understand a situation where you have to debug an "input method config file" just because you want to type some text. Windows is a black box platform where multilingual rendering and the Office ecosystem are perfectly integrated. Only a very small fraction of its API is exposed. However, for the vast majority of applications, that is more than enough. The idea that Linux is great applies mostly to English speaking developers or those who want to fit into that English speaking development culture, but from a pure usability standpoint, I believe Windows is better. Linux is technically a glass box, but honestly, no one can understand every single part of it, meaning it practically functions as a cognitive black box anyway. Furthermore, Windows supports true plug and play where hardware just works the moment you connect it. Linux does not. Debating whether Linux or Windows is technically superior is meaningless, but I absolutely do not agree with the claim that Windows is terrible. Many Americans argue that Linux is better once you learn how to use it properly, but the moment you step outside the US, Linux becomes a flawed system where nothing works as it should.
- bell-cot 2mo ago
  I don't know Amiga well, but IBM's OS/2 efforts were plagued by several Big Blue Blunders. And both the i432 and Itanium were sounded-great ideas - for which Intel could not ship even expensive and mediocre-performance hardware in any reasonable time.
- ghaff 2mo ago
  I was (and am again) an IT industry analyst for quite a few years. At the risk of stereotyping (and realizing they didn't have a corner on this approach), Japan long liked marching to their own drummer with designs that were out of the mainstream to a greater or lesser degree.western
- decide1000 2mo ago
  I wouldn't describe it as luck, it's politics. The mother of Bill Gates had access to the board of IBM. She was also the co-founder of Microsoft.
- moregrist 2mo ago
  > And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80s the PC market was still pretty new. Business was still run on IBM mainframes, DEC VAX, and other systems that were overtaken by forces in the late-80s and early 90s. These seemed unstoppable until they weren’t. I think the strongest counter example, though, is probably Linux. If your thesis was correct, an early-90s hobby operating system by some kid at a uni in Finland would never be dominant in cloud server spaces by the 2000s. > Amiga couldn't over come the PC. This is probably your best example. I would add BeOS to this. On the other hand, Apple managed to attract a core audience and stay alive (even if barely) through the 90s. Sometimes you don’t have to overtake; you just need to have a solid niche. > IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2. OS/2 originally lost to Windows as a successor to DOS due to execution, not because Windows had a huge moat. OS/2 Warp was a bit later. The story of OS/2 failing is sad and as much about IBM internal politics as about Microsoft succeeding. > Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium. Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s (and possibly today) and didn’t seem to understand that most business applications at the time were limited by branching and integer computations. That stuff doesn’t vectorize well. The arch might be better-received today, although moving pipeline concerns to the compiler still seems like a bad choice to me. As a counterpoint, consider the rise of ARM in the 2010s. An arch known mostly in the embedded world has become a real player in the desktop and server environment. All because of the rise of phones, reasonable licensing, and better perf/watt at low power than x86.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    > Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s Funny Intel didn’t just fell for this once, but twice. I wonder what was Microsoft’s role on Itanium’s failure - it would be in their best interest for it to succeed with Windows running on it.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > Amiga couldn't over come the PC Amiga was too tightly designed around its chips, which were too tightly designed around NTSC timings. The more modular architecture of the PC allowed hardware to evolve at a far lower cost.
charcircuit 2mo ago
By 1989 MS-DOS was already dominant in Japan. Without being able to run DOS applications I struggle to see it actually take off. Microsoft on the other hand released Windows 95 with compatibility with DOS applications and it took off.
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ktallett 2mo ago
This is a tricky one as it's similar to Amiga OS and Be OS where it's obviously so forward thinking but as other comments state that doesn't automatically lead to uptake. Of a similar ilk, I always felt the MSX base deserved a higher usage rate in the rest of the world, PC engine as a console too. Neither really took off elsewhere.
- lproven 2mo ago
  The GUI looks a bit similar at a trivial level, but underneath, BeOS and AmigaOS were both far more mainstream and conventional than TRON.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > obviously so forward thinking but as other comments state that doesn't automatically lead to uptake. There are numerous examples for that. Plan9 is another interesting one - they wanted to improve on Unix (and did, in many ways), but the software market just wasn’t that enthusiastic about it.
hiherer 2mo ago
[dead]
msephton 2mo ago
Great to see these screenshots. Thanks for posting! Nintendo joy cons run a version of micro TRON. And the software IntelligentPad used a lot of TRON concepts. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/05/17/intelligentpad-component-based-drag-and-drop-software-creator/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/05/17/intelligentpad-co...
- lkirkwood 2mo ago
  Youre kidding! That's a great fact. Do you have a source for that joycon part?
  - msephton 2mo ago
    Here we go! Press release. 2017.06.22 Nintendo Switch Game Console Adopts eSOL µITRON 4.0-Compliant RTOS and exFAT File System https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html
    - AdamConwayIE 2mo ago
      Oh wow! Article writer here, can't believe I didn't come across this when I was researching. Kicking myself haha
      - msephton 2mo ago
        There were a handful of reportedly great pixel drawing apps for TRON, which I'm going to try when I'm back from vacation. So thanks for the info about TRON VMs.
  - numpad0 2mo ago
    uITRON isn't rare on microcontrollers, especially in automotive. A lot of uC has official BSPs based on it.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
  There are bits of TRON all over the electronic musical instruments segment, as well ..
haunter 2mo ago
TRON wasn’t just an OS but a whole integrated system, it was meant to be used with different parts working together. There was a whole TRON house tech demo built in Tokyo back in 1989 https://youtu.be/7jPKEyM44GU https://youtu.be/7jPKEyM44GU If you want to try here is the BTRON 4.5 media, should work in modern VMs https://archive.org/details/chokanji https://archive.org/details/chokanji https://youtu.be/yYfoCe6q28A https://youtu.be/yYfoCe6q28A https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034884455396 https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034...
- RealityVoid 2mo ago
  Hah, I realize I actually encountered this family in the form of a T-kernel offshoot that I evaluated for some automotive safety relevant application.
- a-french-anon 2mo ago
  > You can video-conference while pooping without touching a switch ｢ＴＨＥＦＵＴＵＲＥ｣
- pseudohadamard 2mo ago
  TRON didn't need a conspiracy theory to kill it, it was one of many overambitious computer projects that aimed too high and failed, the IBM Stretch being possibly the best-known example. The OS is still around as uITRON. It's... very Japanese, which is why you'll find it inside a ton of Japanese IT gear and very little else. For most people the closest they'll get to it is in printers from Japanese companies. I've seen a derivative, NORTi, in a few products made in places like Brazil but that's about it.
julio89u 2mo ago
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socalgal2 2mo ago
Feels like clickbait to me. There were lots of OSes. Things like GEM, OS/2, Next, BeOS, GeOS, MSX, ... they didn't succeed and I'm sure you can write some clickbait article about why with conspiratorial anecdotes.
- Zecc 2mo ago
  The title is certainly clickbait-y. But the content is still interesting. And not sloppy.
  - eloisant 2mo ago
    It is, but claiming that it was "killed by the US government", and suggest it would have became the dominant OS is dubious at best. So it's not just clickbait-y, it misleading at best if not just a lie.
    - WillAdams 2mo ago
      At a minimum, it was set by the Japanese Ministry of Education to be used on all computers in schools from primary through college --- if implemented there would have been an entire generation of Japanese students who grew up with that OS.
      - quickthrowman 2mo ago
        There was an entire generation that grew up in Japan that used Japan-only cell phones that were used nowhere else. The same thing would’ve happened with this OS, it would be used in Japan but nowhere else.
        WillAdams 1mo ago
        Yes, but aside from novels (in Japan), not much is written/created on cell phones --- an OS presumably would've had a development environment which might have caused the OS to continue on after education was done.
skeledrew 2mo ago
Of course. Why would the US allow what's essentially their colony in all but name to control that much stack for a critical tech?
- readthenotes1 2mo ago
  And we can blame greed of a Japanese man for actually causing the failure
  - skeledrew 2mo ago
    Was it greed? Or was it a unified vision?
  - waterTanuki 2mo ago
    If you're referring to Masayoshi Son he's Korean by ethnicity, Japanese by nationality.
    - lmz 2mo ago
      It's not polite to point this out to liberals who believe that only your passport matters.
PlunderBunny 2mo ago
Some of the ideas for BTRON sound (to my naive understanding) like OpenDoc. Can anyone familiar with OpenDoc comment?
readthenotes1 2mo ago
The description at the beginning makes it sound a lot like The Analyst that shipped with smalltalk-80, a Hypertext active dictionary. What could have been...
jdw64 2mo ago
Because the final consumers are ultimately Americans with purchasing power, this structure inherently makes it easy for the US to dominate the standards. As a result, it is extremely difficult for economically lower tier countries to preemptively establish new standards. Furthermore, the profits taken by those who bring American products into local regions present another issue. In reality, under this system, those who bring back American advancements through avenues like studying abroad profit by exploiting the technological gap between the US and their home country. (Masayoshi Son from the article is no different.) And the people who go to study in the US are predominantly from upper class families. Within this structure, countries that are heavily dependent on exports to the US are particularly vulnerable. At such a juncture, no matter how much academic curiosity drives the effort, attempting to destroy the established standard might be technically correct, but it was a politically incorrect judgment.
shevy-java 2mo ago
> designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 The USA is acting very hostile and selfish. Their own mega-corporations were protected and integrated into the military apparatus; currently we see this with Facebook forcing its slaves to use spyglasses. One can also see this with the USA attacking Iran - suddenly the promise "we will protect you" has been revealed to have been a lie. It's all about selfish powerplay. I think the biggest shifts we see here is that more countries will build up a nuclear arsenal (in most cases just defensive, to increase the cost of an invasion; in particular Taiwan needs that since the USA will not do much at all once dictator Xi will invade; we also saw that with Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. That would not happen if Ukraine would have had a nuclear arsenal).
max979 2mo ago
The TRON house demo from 1989 was genuinely ahead of its time. Hard to compete on technology when your competitor has the US trade office backing them.
eloisant 2mo ago
One interesting thing is it's encoding system. Unlike Unicode that unified Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, TRON had a different code points for characters that have the same root but are written differently in the different languages. Unicode claim it's the same character and you need to use different fonts for different languages. So TRON made it much easier to mix Japanese and Chinese, for example have a citation in Chinese in a book otherwise in Japanese. It also had a lot more characters. Unicode dropped some of the older or rare characters, meaning some people can't write their last name with the correct character on a computer with Unicode. They have to use a similar but different character. With TRON, they could. That said, this might be an example of why TRON didn't succeed (rather than this bullshit about the US government). They remade everything, which wasn't great for interoperability and compatibility with other systems.
- unscaled 2mo ago
  You can mix Japanese and Chinese with modern document authoring standards or with HTML, but the fact is that most people are too lazy to do that. It's a pet peeve of mine when a document gets displayed with a Japanese font but then falls back to another Chinese font when it encounters characters that are missing in the Japanese font. Even when the fonts look the same (or when you're using a unified CJK font like Noto), things will still look bad if the language is not specified, since some characters are written different in each language (or even different variants of Chinese), but still got unified[1]. I laud what TRON tried to do, but I don't think they had it right. They made the encoding too complex (especially for the 1990s) while Unicode offered a single Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode quickly got complex too (mostly due to the mistake of adopting UCS2 and then repurposing that as UTF16 and adding surrogates, and later getting a little bit over the top with combining emojis), but TRON was complex in other ways. If you mixed both Chinese and Japanese in a single documents, you had a multiple encodings to care about and control characters to switch between them. Suddenly, the character encoding is not stateless anymore. You can say the same about Unicode, but the statefulness of UTF-8 or UTF-16 is local and easily recoverable. Same goes for the statefulness combining diacritics, and bidirectional markers (which are rarely used) only affect the display. TRON code plane switches, as far as I understand, mean that even a simple text search or regex search would stop working and need to be completely redesigned, since it now has to be aware of which language we're reading right now! That's a big break, as you say. > It also had a lot more characters. Unicode dropped some of the older or rare characters, meaning some people can't write their last name with the correct character on a computer with Unicode. Only if they're very old and born before or during the war or its not their legal name. The Japanese government restricts the Kanji that can be used in names to Jōyō kanji (regular use kanji) and Jinmeiyō kanji (personal name kanji). Together they add up to roughly 3000 kanji. The list was back in 1991 when Unicode 1.0 was released, but it did include all of them, and many more, as did previous Japanese standards that predated TRON like JIS X 0208. I feel like the "people can't write their name" was always a bit of cope. Japan is still the country of "the nail that sticks out gets hammered". If your name falls outside of the legally allowed list of Kanji, you'll suffer even if you're running BTRON. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language-dependent_glyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...
Lagoon3384_SWE 2mo ago
[flagged]
jmorenoamor 2mo ago
We usually point conspiration theories with fun (with a reason) but it's also surprising how some "success" narratives are based on a government killing competition.
krautburglar 2mo ago
From the demos & article, looks & sounds more like proto-web hypermedia than operating system. Even if it had succeeded, it would have grown the same way WHATWG grew (i.e. like cancer). IMHO, seems like a terminal case of NIH.
Varelion 2mo ago
[flagged]
Uptrenda 2mo ago
Can any hardware and OS experts here comment on whether the design envisioned here was a good idea? It's definitely not my field but I'm curious.
unscaled 2mo ago
I don't know how much the USTR campaign against TRON affected the success of BTRON, but I feel like we should be careful about this explanation. This is a classic example of American exceptionalism, but it seems like the USTR mandate just created a certain amount of FUD around TRON at best. You can see that it targets both BTRON (The desktop version TRON) and CTRON (the telco version of TRON), but unlike BTRON, CTRON did see real adoption and even dominance in the 1990s. I think the main reasons behind BTRON failure like in the domestic market. I really don't know much about this period but here is my understanding. BTRON was never an OS, but rather a specification, a set of standards for how BTRON-compatible operating systems should behave. This is quite similar to POSIX, but the standard covered significantly more than POSIX (e.g. HMI guidelines and character encoding) and the BTRON standard came _before_ the implementations. But just like POSIX, there was no guaranteed ABI compatibility. And to make things worse, every implementation had to be rewritten from scratch, while most Unix distributions before GNU traced their code all the way back to AT&T Unix. The other issue is that with BTRON1, the OS implementation seem to have been expected to be developed by the hardware vendor - they were not envisioned as highly portable operating systems yet. The different OSs were supposed to be developed by OEM vendors and interated directly into their hardware (especially with BTRON1). From what I could find, only 3 vendors have signed up for BTRON: Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and OKI[1]. As far as I can tell, out of the three, only Panasonic ended up releasing BTRON-based computers. Panasonic went quite heavy on TRON and released multiple BTRON products, but Panasonic was a minor player in the home PC market in 1990[2]. Another small company that picked up BTRON was Personal Media. They released a sizable variety of BTRON-based hardware during the years and eventually started releasing it as a software package. In fact, they're still active today, rleasing it as chokanji, running inside a VM on Windows[3]. They basically took BTRONs impressive Kanji support and pivoted to an IME allowing inputting Kanji characters outside of Unicode. The names that are missing from this story are all the big players in the PC industry in Japan in the 1990s. It's obvious why IBM Japan wasn't onboard, but NEC had its own monopoly to protect and Fujitsu and EPSON were clearly not interested[4]. CTRON, on the other hand, was picked up by NTT, which is probably the only company that mattered in Japanese telecommunications back in the early 1990s. BTRON had a window of opportunity in 1990, since Japan (or the rest of the world for that matter) did not have a dominant GUI platform yet. But in a market where the OS came with the hardware, lackluster vendor supported kinda sealed the deal. [1] https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29 https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29 [2] AFAIK it was heavily dominated by NEC, with the smaller players bein Toshiba, Fujitsu and Epson. In 1990, when the first BTRON implementations were released, the dominant standard was PC-98, which was developed by NEC, with Toshiba and Epson making PC-98 clones. Even though all these computers were running x86 and usually ran on MS-DOS, they were NOT compatible with IBM PCs. This is mostly due to IBM PC not having enough RAM to display Kanji, so the which Japanese PC manufacturers in the 1980s solved with custom Kanji ROM chips. Getting Kanji support throughout the stack also meant heavily modifying MS-DOS and producing a different software stack that is tied to the custom hardware. 1990 is also the year that both DOS/V (a localized version of DOS that had built-in Kanji support) and Windows 3.0 were released, and both of them eventually lead to the death of domestic Japanese PC standards, since they could sufficiently support Kanji in software. 286 and 386 based PCs with extended memory were also powerful enough now to support Kanji in software, and DOS/V and Windows provided a standard application runtime environment for that. But this eventual standardization took time and back in 1990, PC-98 dominated the home market, while IBM managed to get some corporate market share with its PS/55 (an IBM PC variant with a custom display adapter with its own Kanji ROM). [3] https://www.chokanji.com/ https://www.chokanji.com/ [4] OP happily mentions NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu, but it fails to mention that they joined other TRON initiatives (ITRON, CTRON and The TRON chip) and explicitly declined to join BTRON.
sharpshadow 2mo ago
Just found out that Nikon cameras run this ITRON RTOS, probably part of why they haven’t been reversed engineered yet.
vkaku 2mo ago
One can *ACTUALLY* do things if they stop listening to lobbyists and prioritize locally developed products over lobbied products, just saying. Given the current US debt situation, Japan is in a position to dictate its local manufacturing terms and actually do what it wants to do. Meanwhile, in the US, the products being sold are highly lobbied and relies on the government moat to be protected in order for things to work. The side effect of that also means that some of the companies really don't lead to innovative outcomes in the long run, and are in positions of lucky power. This leads to poorer customer experiences, poorer technical outcomes and non competitiveness in the long run, like manufacturing. This trend needs to be reversed and the US leaders should be held responsible for doing the right thing here. I'm well aware of TRON and its capabilities. I really think Japan can develop this and market it locally, without requiring all the bloat the current OS world comes with; It might actually turn into a speed and security advantage if they did this right.
- glimshe 2mo ago
  Japan has an even more severe debt problem than the US, with a rapidly aging and declining population making it a much tougher hurdle to overcome.
  - vkaku 2mo ago
    They don't seem to have a shortage of corporations across the world, really. They simply need to implement it. Today, most people can vibe code their own OSes and emulators within a day or two. You're telling me an entire country can't do it? That is so defeatist. Plus, there are some young people who are seemingly bored and have an economy not plagued by the same lobby issues as the US. They might be able to get cracking on it.
    - rbanffy 2mo ago
      > most people can vibe code their own OSes That’s very much not something that can be vibed unless we are talking at an extremely simple embedded with minimal functionality.
conartist6 2mo ago
The article tells a very different story than the headline suggests
donatj 2mo ago
I think this really overplays the "US intervening" angle for clickbait. The US mentioned it in an official document. That is all. It was a weird interesting OS that failed to take off largely because of how engrained systems already were. Did I mention it was weird and its benefits non-obvious particularly to businesses.
the_interloper 2mo ago
Some context for what was happening in the US at the time: Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464347 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464347
cassepipe 2mo ago
> Files can exist in multiple locations without duplication, linked by the system rather than by symlinks or shortcuts, I always think about linux hard-links and always though they were pretty cool but I don't think I have encountered any in the wild so far (I am not a sysadmin though)
quickthrowman 2mo ago
A Japanese OS never had any chance of being adopted by any place that isn’t Japan due (mostly) their non-alphabetic writing system. Japan is full of weird Japan only technologies that were adopted nowhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
"BTRON's desktop was decades ahead of where computing actually went" Trying to mentally parse this… I had to laugh, what does that even mean?
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  I love this phrase. It implies they were years ahead of the market, predicting the future in depth, but it’s just that it wasn’t the future that actually materialised.

390 points by rdmuser 2mo ago

I think it is like most software, especially in the OS space. The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that. And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. Amiga couldn't over come the PC. IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2. Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium. Luck and market forces from said luck played a huge part in determining who won.

specproc 2mo ago
> The report stated that the US had concerns about Japanese government market intervention to support the TRON OS and identified two specific markets where TRON was receiving government advantage. The US government is one hell of a moat.
- childintime 2mo ago
  The financial center of the world selects its winners nearby. As simple as that. Businesses outside of the US have never had much of a chance. China does the same now, as the engineering center of the world. And they have to because the financial center is hyping them as a threat.
  - bulbar 2mo ago
    A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance. That's not "hype".
    - otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
      You're confusing "ally" and "vassal". Allies are countries that send troops to help you in war.
      - tremon 2mo ago
        Whereas vassals are countries that you draft to help you in war?
        mr_toad 2mo ago
        Yes, by definition, a vassal owes allegiance to their lord, which includes military service. But you can’t really take a feudal term and apply it to modern politics. Taiwan doesn’t resemble a vassal in any meaningful way.
        Calazon 2mo ago
        I think the idea is that a vassal state (operates as though it) owes allegiance to a stronger state, while governing itself (more or less) independently. And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states. Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.
      - specproc 2mo ago
        So many dead lads from both my countries fighting American wars, for zero gain to our peoples. That's vassalship, not an alliance.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - OroPla 2mo ago
        Allies will only help you if you are winning the war. Vassals will also help if you are losing.
      - 2mo ago
    - roenxi 2mo ago
      On the other hand, we can't tell if the US has a goal or not in the middle east or if destabilising countries is the geostrategy unto itself. People really need to dial down the hype, engage with the real world where large countries get to have a sphere of influence and start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable. I still haven't heard anyone make a case for why we keep hitting the Russians given what acceptable US foreign policy looks like. One of the two is worse and it isn't the policies written in Cyrillic.
      - pjc50 2mo ago
        > why we keep hitting the Russians 1) "we" (the US) are not hitting the Russians, "we" (Europe including the UK) are providing them with weapons for their self-defence, since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. I am no longer clear what, if any, assistance the US is providing. It is also very important in this that no NATO or EU forces are engaged directly with Russian forces yet, despite persistent incursions into EU airspace and occasional sabotage operations in Western Europe. The UK is developing special US ITAR-free missiles for this purpose: https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Long-Range-Cruise-Missile-Prototypes-for-Ukraine-Under-Project-Brakestop/ https://www.thedefensenews.com/UK-Develops-Three-Low-Cost-Lo... 2) "start talking realistically about what behaviour is tolerable": I think we're past the point of pretending that international law applies evenly, and back to Mao's "power comes out of the barrel of a gun". If we go back to a Cold War multipolar world between China, the US, Europe, and Russia, the only one of those which hasn't made public statements threatening European territorial integrity is China. (at this point I would expect India to start asking whether they get to be a world power or not and what they're going to do with that, too)
        roenxi 2mo ago
        > since it is in our interest to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe happening on the Polish border. If your argument is preventing trouble on the Polish border, why is the strategy dumping billions and billions of dollars in weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe, who happens to be on the Polish border? Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now? The sensible thing to do would have been to encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border. This strategy actually employed seems like the most direct way to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe on the Polish border. It looks very destabilising. It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked. Can we please be honest about our motivations here? We're all more likely to get what we want. Ideally peace and prosperity.
    - chabska 2mo ago
      Democracy is when you drop a ballot every two/four years, and the elected officers ignore you while they take millions of donation from wealthy donors. Dictatorship is when the unelected representatives work their ass off to better the lives of the average citizens, because they're afraid of a revolution. (P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)
      - pjc50 2mo ago
        The UK PM change happened indirectly as a result of poor performance in the local elections. It does actually matter that the UK has multiple parties that effectively compete, even if some of them are blatantly sockpuppets for overseas millionaires.
      - Lio 2mo ago
        That's because in the time since Xi took over China there's been 7 different UK Prime Ministers, most of whom were kicked out of office before their term ended. In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
        chabska 2mo ago
        Why are we using British PM count like it means anything. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel served longer as Kanzler than Xi has served as President. Is Germany a dictatorship? (Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)
        Lio 2mo ago
        The point is that PM count proves it was possible for other people to remove serving PMs from power. They were not able to ignore public opinion indefinitely and could be removed from power without the need for term limits. No one can remove Xi from power if they don't like the way he performs. No one in China can even publicly discuss his performance except to praise him. That's what makes China a dictatorship and the UK a democracy.
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      > A dictatorship with the explicit goal of invading Taiwan, which is not only a close ally, but also of global geostrategic importance. I think it's a safe bet that China will invade precisely when they think this won't cause them severe negative losses. This will likely be when Taiwan finds itself no longer a close ally of the USA, nor of global geostrategic importance. Of course, "safe bet" doesn't mean "in all possible timelines"; they may end up echoing the Bay of Pigs, Hormuz, or stumble against the hubris that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand into a world war where all belligerents had the mistaken belief they would win.
    - juusto 2mo ago
      The "dicatorship" of China never implemented such a thing in my country. USA "democracy" did.
    - kshri24 2mo ago
      I don't like China for how it is behaving with my country but it is rich to talk about "invasions" when all the invading in the past half a century has been done by a Sole Democratic Superpower and its lackeys. Cannot believe I am having to defend China here but here we are!
      - Paradigma11 2mo ago
        [dead]
  - expedition32 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - conductr 2mo ago
    It’s also just less risky and easier to work with people that you are near, speak your language, etc. more so back in the 80s before most people were even using email, we Americans had virtually no contact with people on other continents even was limited in the business world.
    - childintime 2mo ago
      I wholeheartedly agree. Even China integrated. It's not where the rift comes from.
krige 2mo ago
> Amiga couldn't over come the PC. For reasons that had nothing to do with OS. Swap Steve Jobs with Irving Gould and Apple would be dead in under a decade too.
- kalleboo 2mo ago
  Tramiel left Commodore in 1984 after battling Gould and Jobs left Apple in 1985 after battling Sculley. Apple then went on to have terrible management for over a decade, with people like Michael Spindler trying their best to run the company into the ground. Apple only survived as long as they did since they had really fat margins on their machines so e.g. the Apple II could subsidize the Macintosh for years. Commodore's focus on low cost made it a lot more difficult for them to e.g. fund the evolution of the Amiga properly.
tonyhart7 2mo ago
apparently China decision to ban US tech company and build their own counterpart is seen as Genius after 20 years
- arkh 2mo ago
  One of the advantages of an autocracy: you don't need people's approval every 5 years so you can plan for decades. When you're right it is awesome. When you're wrong, well that's what the army is for.
  - tonyhart7 2mo ago
    You can badmouth about China all you want but at least they are consistent where they stand while US flip flopping about invading middle east (like usual) or Greenland
    - hvb2 2mo ago
      I don't think he was badmouthing China at all. He's basically using different words to make the exact same point you're trying to make. When there's no real accountability, in a reasonable timeframe, it's much easier to plan long term. It's the same within companies. When the CEO assumes he'll be around for 5 years, should he shoot for the 10 year goal and reduce outcomes in the early years? Or does he just optimize for the next 5 years, thereby neglecting the long term goal?
      - tonyhart7 2mo ago
        "When you're wrong, well that's what the army is for." he is implying that China bad action can be solved by PL red Army
        fc417fc802 2mo ago
        He's not implying, he stated it directly. If you think he's wrong then tell me - what do you believe would happen there in the event of widespread social unrest or grievances against the sitting government?
close04 2mo ago
> it just needs to get lucky enough to To not compete with something from a country which sees its interests threatened and has the power to squeeze you dry. The US intervention to apply pressure handed a weapon to an internal player, Masayoshi Son who just happened to make money selling US software. He used that weapon against his and US' competition. It's a playbook that the US used again and again when it saw its interests threatened by competition: hit the enemy hard below the belt while handing weapons to another internal player who will also hit the enemy below the belt. Every other example you gave came from inside the US, even from the same company with multiple products. The market played the defining role there and pushed for survival of the fittest. In TRON's case "market forces" turned out to be US intervention.
Aperocky 2mo ago
Is it luck or bold product and marketing decision? Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight.
shevy-java 2mo ago
> The technology doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to get lucky enough to become a standard and build a moat with that. I don't know about that. Top 500 supercomputers running Linux. I use both Linux and Win10, for instance (won't switch to Win11 no matter what), but whenever I have to use Windows, I wonder how this garbage could ever become so dominating in the first place. Inefficiency is very clearly a work culture at Microsoft; I notice this every time I copy data. And then wingers for Windows babble about how Microsoft does so much more behind the scenes - all of which is totally pointless. It is such an utter trash operating system, so I can not agree with "it it is ok to suck" statements. I much prefer solid engineering at all times.
- jdw64 2mo ago
  But the idea that Windows is a "better OS" really seems accurate for people in the Third World. This is because Korean language support on Linux is terrible, and since all the commands are in English, it takes quite a bit of time to get used to it. Not only that, but there are so many distributions that you do not even know what to configure, and rather than doing RTFM, I just want to get my "work" done. In that regard, I honestly think Linux is better once you master it, but realistically, Windows is much more casual and practical. You might disagree, but for people outside the Anglosphere, Windows is far more casual. To be completely honest, the vast majority of people do not even like looking at PowerShell or terminal windows. It is familiar to programmers like us, but honestly, I do not like looking at terminal windows either. I would much rather look at an IDE. In the English speaking Linux world, you just map ASCII, but we need things like ibus or fcitx. On top of that, there have been CJK input method fragmentation and conflict issues for over 20 years. I think this gap exists because they cannot understand a situation where you have to debug an "input method config file" just because you want to type some text. Windows is a black box platform where multilingual rendering and the Office ecosystem are perfectly integrated. Only a very small fraction of its API is exposed. However, for the vast majority of applications, that is more than enough. The idea that Linux is great applies mostly to English speaking developers or those who want to fit into that English speaking development culture, but from a pure usability standpoint, I believe Windows is better. Linux is technically a glass box, but honestly, no one can understand every single part of it, meaning it practically functions as a cognitive black box anyway. Furthermore, Windows supports true plug and play where hardware just works the moment you connect it. Linux does not. Debating whether Linux or Windows is technically superior is meaningless, but I absolutely do not agree with the claim that Windows is terrible. Many Americans argue that Linux is better once you learn how to use it properly, but the moment you step outside the US, Linux becomes a flawed system where nothing works as it should.
bell-cot 2mo ago
I don't know Amiga well, but IBM's OS/2 efforts were plagued by several Big Blue Blunders. And both the i432 and Itanium were sounded-great ideas - for which Intel could not ship even expensive and mediocre-performance hardware in any reasonable time.
ghaff 2mo ago
I was (and am again) an IT industry analyst for quite a few years. At the risk of stereotyping (and realizing they didn't have a corner on this approach), Japan long liked marching to their own drummer with designs that were out of the mainstream to a greater or lesser degree.western
decide1000 2mo ago
I wouldn't describe it as luck, it's politics. The mother of Bill Gates had access to the board of IBM. She was also the co-founder of Microsoft.
moregrist 2mo ago
> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80s the PC market was still pretty new. Business was still run on IBM mainframes, DEC VAX, and other systems that were overtaken by forces in the late-80s and early 90s. These seemed unstoppable until they weren’t. I think the strongest counter example, though, is probably Linux. If your thesis was correct, an early-90s hobby operating system by some kid at a uni in Finland would never be dominant in cloud server spaces by the 2000s. > Amiga couldn't over come the PC. This is probably your best example. I would add BeOS to this. On the other hand, Apple managed to attract a core audience and stay alive (even if barely) through the 90s. Sometimes you don’t have to overtake; you just need to have a solid niche. > IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2. OS/2 originally lost to Windows as a successor to DOS due to execution, not because Windows had a huge moat. OS/2 Warp was a bit later. The story of OS/2 failing is sad and as much about IBM internal politics as about Microsoft succeeding. > Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium. Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s (and possibly today) and didn’t seem to understand that most business applications at the time were limited by branching and integer computations. That stuff doesn’t vectorize well. The arch might be better-received today, although moving pipeline concerns to the compiler still seems like a bad choice to me. As a counterpoint, consider the rise of ARM in the 2010s. An arch known mostly in the embedded world has become a real player in the desktop and server environment. All because of the rise of phones, reasonable licensing, and better perf/watt at low power than x86.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s Funny Intel didn’t just fell for this once, but twice. I wonder what was Microsoft’s role on Itanium’s failure - it would be in their best interest for it to succeed with Windows running on it.
rbanffy 2mo ago
> Amiga couldn't over come the PC Amiga was too tightly designed around its chips, which were too tightly designed around NTSC timings. The more modular architecture of the PC allowed hardware to evolve at a far lower cost.

charcircuit 2mo ago

By 1989 MS-DOS was already dominant in Japan. Without being able to run DOS applications I struggle to see it actually take off. Microsoft on the other hand released Windows 95 with compatibility with DOS applications and it took off.

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ktallett 2mo ago

This is a tricky one as it's similar to Amiga OS and Be OS where it's obviously so forward thinking but as other comments state that doesn't automatically lead to uptake. Of a similar ilk, I always felt the MSX base deserved a higher usage rate in the rest of the world, PC engine as a console too. Neither really took off elsewhere.

lproven 2mo ago
The GUI looks a bit similar at a trivial level, but underneath, BeOS and AmigaOS were both far more mainstream and conventional than TRON.
rbanffy 2mo ago
> obviously so forward thinking but as other comments state that doesn't automatically lead to uptake. There are numerous examples for that. Plan9 is another interesting one - they wanted to improve on Unix (and did, in many ways), but the software market just wasn’t that enthusiastic about it.

hiherer 2mo ago

[dead]

msephton 2mo ago

Great to see these screenshots. Thanks for posting! Nintendo joy cons run a version of micro TRON. And the software IntelligentPad used a lot of TRON concepts. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/05/17/intelligentpad-component-based-drag-and-drop-software-creator/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/05/17/intelligentpad-co...

lkirkwood 2mo ago
Youre kidding! That's a great fact. Do you have a source for that joycon part?
- msephton 2mo ago
  Here we go! Press release. 2017.06.22 Nintendo Switch Game Console Adopts eSOL µITRON 4.0-Compliant RTOS and exFAT File System https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html
  - AdamConwayIE 2mo ago
    Oh wow! Article writer here, can't believe I didn't come across this when I was researching. Kicking myself haha
    - msephton 2mo ago
      There were a handful of reportedly great pixel drawing apps for TRON, which I'm going to try when I'm back from vacation. So thanks for the info about TRON VMs.
- numpad0 2mo ago
  uITRON isn't rare on microcontrollers, especially in automotive. A lot of uC has official BSPs based on it.
MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
There are bits of TRON all over the electronic musical instruments segment, as well ..

haunter 2mo ago

TRON wasn’t just an OS but a whole integrated system, it was meant to be used with different parts working together. There was a whole TRON house tech demo built in Tokyo back in 1989 https://youtu.be/7jPKEyM44GU https://youtu.be/7jPKEyM44GU If you want to try here is the BTRON 4.5 media, should work in modern VMs https://archive.org/details/chokanji https://archive.org/details/chokanji https://youtu.be/yYfoCe6q28A https://youtu.be/yYfoCe6q28A https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034884455396 https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034...

RealityVoid 2mo ago
Hah, I realize I actually encountered this family in the form of a T-kernel offshoot that I evaluated for some automotive safety relevant application.
a-french-anon 2mo ago
> You can video-conference while pooping without touching a switch ｢ＴＨＥＦＵＴＵＲＥ｣
pseudohadamard 2mo ago
TRON didn't need a conspiracy theory to kill it, it was one of many overambitious computer projects that aimed too high and failed, the IBM Stretch being possibly the best-known example. The OS is still around as uITRON. It's... very Japanese, which is why you'll find it inside a ton of Japanese IT gear and very little else. For most people the closest they'll get to it is in printers from Japanese companies. I've seen a derivative, NORTi, in a few products made in places like Brazil but that's about it.

julio89u 2mo ago

[dead]

socalgal2 2mo ago

Feels like clickbait to me. There were lots of OSes. Things like GEM, OS/2, Next, BeOS, GeOS, MSX, ... they didn't succeed and I'm sure you can write some clickbait article about why with conspiratorial anecdotes.

Zecc 2mo ago
The title is certainly clickbait-y. But the content is still interesting. And not sloppy.
- eloisant 2mo ago
  It is, but claiming that it was "killed by the US government", and suggest it would have became the dominant OS is dubious at best. So it's not just clickbait-y, it misleading at best if not just a lie.
  - WillAdams 2mo ago
    At a minimum, it was set by the Japanese Ministry of Education to be used on all computers in schools from primary through college --- if implemented there would have been an entire generation of Japanese students who grew up with that OS.
    - quickthrowman 2mo ago
      There was an entire generation that grew up in Japan that used Japan-only cell phones that were used nowhere else. The same thing would’ve happened with this OS, it would be used in Japan but nowhere else.
      - WillAdams 1mo ago
        Yes, but aside from novels (in Japan), not much is written/created on cell phones --- an OS presumably would've had a development environment which might have caused the OS to continue on after education was done.

skeledrew 2mo ago

Of course. Why would the US allow what's essentially their colony in all but name to control that much stack for a critical tech?

readthenotes1 2mo ago
And we can blame greed of a Japanese man for actually causing the failure
- skeledrew 2mo ago
  Was it greed? Or was it a unified vision?
- waterTanuki 2mo ago
  If you're referring to Masayoshi Son he's Korean by ethnicity, Japanese by nationality.
  - lmz 2mo ago
    It's not polite to point this out to liberals who believe that only your passport matters.

PlunderBunny 2mo ago

Some of the ideas for BTRON sound (to my naive understanding) like OpenDoc. Can anyone familiar with OpenDoc comment?

readthenotes1 2mo ago

The description at the beginning makes it sound a lot like The Analyst that shipped with smalltalk-80, a Hypertext active dictionary. What could have been...

jdw64 2mo ago

Because the final consumers are ultimately Americans with purchasing power, this structure inherently makes it easy for the US to dominate the standards. As a result, it is extremely difficult for economically lower tier countries to preemptively establish new standards. Furthermore, the profits taken by those who bring American products into local regions present another issue. In reality, under this system, those who bring back American advancements through avenues like studying abroad profit by exploiting the technological gap between the US and their home country. (Masayoshi Son from the article is no different.) And the people who go to study in the US are predominantly from upper class families. Within this structure, countries that are heavily dependent on exports to the US are particularly vulnerable. At such a juncture, no matter how much academic curiosity drives the effort, attempting to destroy the established standard might be technically correct, but it was a politically incorrect judgment.

shevy-java 2mo ago

> designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 The USA is acting very hostile and selfish. Their own mega-corporations were protected and integrated into the military apparatus; currently we see this with Facebook forcing its slaves to use spyglasses. One can also see this with the USA attacking Iran - suddenly the promise "we will protect you" has been revealed to have been a lie. It's all about selfish powerplay. I think the biggest shifts we see here is that more countries will build up a nuclear arsenal (in most cases just defensive, to increase the cost of an invasion; in particular Taiwan needs that since the USA will not do much at all once dictator Xi will invade; we also saw that with Putin starting his genocide against Ukraine. That would not happen if Ukraine would have had a nuclear arsenal).

max979 2mo ago

The TRON house demo from 1989 was genuinely ahead of its time. Hard to compete on technology when your competitor has the US trade office backing them.

eloisant 2mo ago

One interesting thing is it's encoding system. Unlike Unicode that unified Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters, TRON had a different code points for characters that have the same root but are written differently in the different languages. Unicode claim it's the same character and you need to use different fonts for different languages. So TRON made it much easier to mix Japanese and Chinese, for example have a citation in Chinese in a book otherwise in Japanese. It also had a lot more characters. Unicode dropped some of the older or rare characters, meaning some people can't write their last name with the correct character on a computer with Unicode. They have to use a similar but different character. With TRON, they could. That said, this might be an example of why TRON didn't succeed (rather than this bullshit about the US government). They remade everything, which wasn't great for interoperability and compatibility with other systems.

unscaled 2mo ago
You can mix Japanese and Chinese with modern document authoring standards or with HTML, but the fact is that most people are too lazy to do that. It's a pet peeve of mine when a document gets displayed with a Japanese font but then falls back to another Chinese font when it encounters characters that are missing in the Japanese font. Even when the fonts look the same (or when you're using a unified CJK font like Noto), things will still look bad if the language is not specified, since some characters are written different in each language (or even different variants of Chinese), but still got unified[1]. I laud what TRON tried to do, but I don't think they had it right. They made the encoding too complex (especially for the 1990s) while Unicode offered a single Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode quickly got complex too (mostly due to the mistake of adopting UCS2 and then repurposing that as UTF16 and adding surrogates, and later getting a little bit over the top with combining emojis), but TRON was complex in other ways. If you mixed both Chinese and Japanese in a single documents, you had a multiple encodings to care about and control characters to switch between them. Suddenly, the character encoding is not stateless anymore. You can say the same about Unicode, but the statefulness of UTF-8 or UTF-16 is local and easily recoverable. Same goes for the statefulness combining diacritics, and bidirectional markers (which are rarely used) only affect the display. TRON code plane switches, as far as I understand, mean that even a simple text search or regex search would stop working and need to be completely redesigned, since it now has to be aware of which language we're reading right now! That's a big break, as you say. > It also had a lot more characters. Unicode dropped some of the older or rare characters, meaning some people can't write their last name with the correct character on a computer with Unicode. Only if they're very old and born before or during the war or its not their legal name. The Japanese government restricts the Kanji that can be used in names to Jōyō kanji (regular use kanji) and Jinmeiyō kanji (personal name kanji). Together they add up to roughly 3000 kanji. The list was back in 1991 when Unicode 1.0 was released, but it did include all of them, and many more, as did previous Japanese standards that predated TRON like JIS X 0208. I feel like the "people can't write their name" was always a bit of cope. Japan is still the country of "the nail that sticks out gets hammered". If your name falls outside of the legally allowed list of Kanji, you'll suffer even if you're running BTRON. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language-dependent_glyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...

Lagoon3384_SWE 2mo ago

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jmorenoamor 2mo ago

We usually point conspiration theories with fun (with a reason) but it's also surprising how some "success" narratives are based on a government killing competition.

krautburglar 2mo ago

From the demos & article, looks & sounds more like proto-web hypermedia than operating system. Even if it had succeeded, it would have grown the same way WHATWG grew (i.e. like cancer). IMHO, seems like a terminal case of NIH.

Varelion 2mo ago

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Uptrenda 2mo ago

Can any hardware and OS experts here comment on whether the design envisioned here was a good idea? It's definitely not my field but I'm curious.

unscaled 2mo ago

I don't know how much the USTR campaign against TRON affected the success of BTRON, but I feel like we should be careful about this explanation. This is a classic example of American exceptionalism, but it seems like the USTR mandate just created a certain amount of FUD around TRON at best. You can see that it targets both BTRON (The desktop version TRON) and CTRON (the telco version of TRON), but unlike BTRON, CTRON did see real adoption and even dominance in the 1990s. I think the main reasons behind BTRON failure like in the domestic market. I really don't know much about this period but here is my understanding. BTRON was never an OS, but rather a specification, a set of standards for how BTRON-compatible operating systems should behave. This is quite similar to POSIX, but the standard covered significantly more than POSIX (e.g. HMI guidelines and character encoding) and the BTRON standard came _before_ the implementations. But just like POSIX, there was no guaranteed ABI compatibility. And to make things worse, every implementation had to be rewritten from scratch, while most Unix distributions before GNU traced their code all the way back to AT&T Unix. The other issue is that with BTRON1, the OS implementation seem to have been expected to be developed by the hardware vendor - they were not envisioned as highly portable operating systems yet. The different OSs were supposed to be developed by OEM vendors and interated directly into their hardware (especially with BTRON1). From what I could find, only 3 vendors have signed up for BTRON: Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and OKI[1]. As far as I can tell, out of the three, only Panasonic ended up releasing BTRON-based computers. Panasonic went quite heavy on TRON and released multiple BTRON products, but Panasonic was a minor player in the home PC market in 1990[2]. Another small company that picked up BTRON was Personal Media. They released a sizable variety of BTRON-based hardware during the years and eventually started releasing it as a software package. In fact, they're still active today, rleasing it as chokanji, running inside a VM on Windows[3]. They basically took BTRONs impressive Kanji support and pivoted to an IME allowing inputting Kanji characters outside of Unicode. The names that are missing from this story are all the big players in the PC industry in Japan in the 1990s. It's obvious why IBM Japan wasn't onboard, but NEC had its own monopoly to protect and Fujitsu and EPSON were clearly not interested[4]. CTRON, on the other hand, was picked up by NTT, which is probably the only company that mattered in Japanese telecommunications back in the early 1990s. BTRON had a window of opportunity in 1990, since Japan (or the rest of the world for that matter) did not have a dominant GUI platform yet. But in a market where the OS came with the hardware, lackluster vendor supported kinda sealed the deal. [1] https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29 https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29 [2] AFAIK it was heavily dominated by NEC, with the smaller players bein Toshiba, Fujitsu and Epson. In 1990, when the first BTRON implementations were released, the dominant standard was PC-98, which was developed by NEC, with Toshiba and Epson making PC-98 clones. Even though all these computers were running x86 and usually ran on MS-DOS, they were NOT compatible with IBM PCs. This is mostly due to IBM PC not having enough RAM to display Kanji, so the which Japanese PC manufacturers in the 1980s solved with custom Kanji ROM chips. Getting Kanji support throughout the stack also meant heavily modifying MS-DOS and producing a different software stack that is tied to the custom hardware. 1990 is also the year that both DOS/V (a localized version of DOS that had built-in Kanji support) and Windows 3.0 were released, and both of them eventually lead to the death of domestic Japanese PC standards, since they could sufficiently support Kanji in software. 286 and 386 based PCs with extended memory were also powerful enough now to support Kanji in software, and DOS/V and Windows provided a standard application runtime environment for that. But this eventual standardization took time and back in 1990, PC-98 dominated the home market, while IBM managed to get some corporate market share with its PS/55 (an IBM PC variant with a custom display adapter with its own Kanji ROM). [3] https://www.chokanji.com/ https://www.chokanji.com/ [4] OP happily mentions NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu, but it fails to mention that they joined other TRON initiatives (ITRON, CTRON and The TRON chip) and explicitly declined to join BTRON.

sharpshadow 2mo ago

Just found out that Nikon cameras run this ITRON RTOS, probably part of why they haven’t been reversed engineered yet.

vkaku 2mo ago

One can *ACTUALLY* do things if they stop listening to lobbyists and prioritize locally developed products over lobbied products, just saying. Given the current US debt situation, Japan is in a position to dictate its local manufacturing terms and actually do what it wants to do. Meanwhile, in the US, the products being sold are highly lobbied and relies on the government moat to be protected in order for things to work. The side effect of that also means that some of the companies really don't lead to innovative outcomes in the long run, and are in positions of lucky power. This leads to poorer customer experiences, poorer technical outcomes and non competitiveness in the long run, like manufacturing. This trend needs to be reversed and the US leaders should be held responsible for doing the right thing here. I'm well aware of TRON and its capabilities. I really think Japan can develop this and market it locally, without requiring all the bloat the current OS world comes with; It might actually turn into a speed and security advantage if they did this right.

glimshe 2mo ago
Japan has an even more severe debt problem than the US, with a rapidly aging and declining population making it a much tougher hurdle to overcome.
- vkaku 2mo ago
  They don't seem to have a shortage of corporations across the world, really. They simply need to implement it. Today, most people can vibe code their own OSes and emulators within a day or two. You're telling me an entire country can't do it? That is so defeatist. Plus, there are some young people who are seemingly bored and have an economy not plagued by the same lobby issues as the US. They might be able to get cracking on it.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    > most people can vibe code their own OSes That’s very much not something that can be vibed unless we are talking at an extremely simple embedded with minimal functionality.

conartist6 2mo ago

The article tells a very different story than the headline suggests

donatj 2mo ago

I think this really overplays the "US intervening" angle for clickbait. The US mentioned it in an official document. That is all. It was a weird interesting OS that failed to take off largely because of how engrained systems already were. Did I mention it was weird and its benefits non-obvious particularly to businesses.

the_interloper 2mo ago

Some context for what was happening in the US at the time: Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464347 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464347

cassepipe 2mo ago

> Files can exist in multiple locations without duplication, linked by the system rather than by symlinks or shortcuts, I always think about linux hard-links and always though they were pretty cool but I don't think I have encountered any in the wild so far (I am not a sysadmin though)

quickthrowman 2mo ago

A Japanese OS never had any chance of being adopted by any place that isn’t Japan due (mostly) their non-alphabetic writing system. Japan is full of weird Japan only technologies that were adopted nowhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome

JKCalhoun 2mo ago

"BTRON's desktop was decades ahead of where computing actually went" Trying to mentally parse this… I had to laugh, what does that even mean?

rbanffy 2mo ago
I love this phrase. It implies they were years ahead of the market, predicting the future in depth, but it’s just that it wasn’t the future that actually materialised.