Japan's TRON OS was killed by US trade pressure, but its embedded twin thrives
Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
In 1989, a US trade report named Japan's TRON operating system a trade barrier, effectively killing its desktop variant BTRON. The project, backed by MITI and major Japanese firms, aimed to create a national OS with a hypermedia file system and custom CPU. Yet its embedded variant ITRON quietly became one of the most deployed OSes in history, running in billions of devices.
TRON itself was never denied, but it became an OS with a blemish from America. We can't use it.
- haunter
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
If you want to
try here is the BTRON 4.5 media, should
work in modern VMs https://archive.org/details/chokanji
https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034...
- ColdStream
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.
- msephton
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-co...
- cassepipe
> 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)
- max979
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.
- donatj
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.
- skeledrew
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?
- the_interloper
Some context for what was happening in the US at the time:
Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993