alt Hacker NewsJapan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
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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.
Great to see these screenshots. Thanks for posting!
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.
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.
Just found out that Nikon cameras run this ITRON RTOS, probably part of why they haven’t been reversed engineered yet.
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.
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?
Some of the ideas for BTRON sound (to my naive understanding) like OpenDoc. Can anyone familiar with OpenDoc comment?
The article tells a very different story than the headline suggests
Because of FUCKING COURSE we did. Has the US ever done anything good besides USAid?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
[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).
[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.
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.
> 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).
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This "USA and CIA is the reason X failed" conspiracy again... its usually "communism" and THIS time it will be good we promise!
TRON wasn’t just an OS but a whole integrated system, it wasn’t 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