| ▲ | Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened(xda-developers.com) |
| 153 points by rdmuser 4 hours ago | 69 comments |
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| ▲ | haunter 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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://youtu.be/yYfoCe6q28A https://social.tchncs.de/@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt/111885034... |
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| ▲ | RealityVoid 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | msephton 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | MomsAVoxell an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | There are bits of TRON all over the electronic musical instruments segment, as well .. | |
| ▲ | lkirkwood 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Youre kidding! That's a great fact. Do you have a source for that joycon part? | | |
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| ▲ | ColdStream 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | specproc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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". | | |
| ▲ | roenxi an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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-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 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | 0dayz 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right, so genocide is better than diplomacy? |
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| ▲ | chabska 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're confusing "ally" and "vassal". Allies are countries that send troops to help you in war. | | |
| ▲ | specproc an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | So many dead lads from both my countries fighting American wars, for zero gain to our peoples. That's vassalship, not an alliance. | |
| ▲ | tremon an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Whereas vassals are countries that you draft to help you in war? | | |
| ▲ | mr_toad 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | krige 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | tonyhart7 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | apparently China decision to ban US tech company and build their own counterpart is seen as Genius after 20 years | | |
| ▲ | arkh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | SiempreViernes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The actual reality of how China works is much more complicated than this "select from a dropdown menu" system you are implying. For one thing it's made up of fairly autonomous provinces that all compete between each others, for another the actual strategy has been heavily relying on extensive local experimentation to find growth models that can be applied nationally. | | |
| ▲ | corimaith 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nah he's correct, local government compete on implementation details, not overall strategy that is monopolize by the central government. Which has the same pitfalls (-see zero-covid or the debt crisis owing to gdp targets) | | |
| ▲ | whatever1 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Also if any of the local governors / entrepreneurs cross a line they just disappear to focus on reading. Some of them might reappear after a decade having thoroughly understood the textbooks. For example Jack Ma reappeared after his successful re-education. | |
| ▲ | mono442 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | China doesn't have a debt crisis. |
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| ▲ | m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It also makes feedback illegal, so corruption and bad decisions get unfixed, untill both not only eat any gains but make the whole thing collapse. | | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but China have death penalty for corruption while Trump literally selling subscription for faster tweet access |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > One of the advantages of an autocracy: you don't need people's approval every 5 years so you can plan for decades. This is a funny thing to say about a system known for its regular issuance of 5-year plans. They have festivals and everything. | |
| ▲ | lava_pidgeon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's selection bias.
China was "lucky" to had the best strategy. But what about the dictatorships who stocked to the wrong strategy. Though it is still interesting to research about Industry politics. In Europe almost all economics looked trapped into the capitalism Vs socialism trap. | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | "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 |
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| ▲ | villish 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did you forget about what happened with Hong Kong? | | | |
| ▲ | close04 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | GP isn't "badmouthing" China, that description applies to every non-democratic country, one leader with the power, not the people. Autocracies are great in the hands of a competent leader who plans the economy long term, and the grows of the country for the benefit of the country and society (look up "benevolent dictators"). They are not afraid of long term plans, or pleasing the population in the short term. He can break some eggs now to feed the whole country tomorrow. This is not something a democratic leader can afford. They live in 4-5 years cycles to please an electorate who looks for immediate benefits. In the hands of an incompetent and abusive leader autocracy is a nightmare that's supported only by fear and violence against the people. These are most dictatorships. Society suffers but can't do anything for fear of being steamrolled by the army. China is straddling a middle ground where the country grew by leaps and bounds, faster than anything else in history probably, but they also use a heavy hand to do this. | | |
| ▲ | touristtam 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think this democratic vs autocratic framing is entirely correct; most of the commenters here fail to mention the political ideology of capitalism. Pre-2000 several European nation had long term plans despite being democracies. The move to further integrate into the EU meant added political pressure to adopt more liberal postures like breaking state ownership of essential industries and that meant also no more of those medium to long term plans for those states. This isn't China vs the rest, this is US Capitalist view of the world vs the rest. China in this present conversation is only an example of a country that has not succumbed to the desiderata of the unrestrained Capitalist. | | |
| ▲ | close04 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Good point but the scale and success rate of the way China does it compared to any other democracy, or any country, in the past puts them in a different league entirely. They are on their 15th 5 year plan and look at the results. A successful planned economy needs an autocratic leader, or a majority of people with foresight and willingness to delay gratification working together. There were very few moments in time when this intersection happened. The last time someone had real planned economy in Europe was in communism time, with the 5-year plans and those were a joke, paper exercises to please the leaders. Those economies slowly failed. The planning you talk about post-'90 was relatively minor, more like a few ongoing projects. Populists and corruption invaded the scene and promised the world now, making realists/idealists look even worse. Promise of short term gain is such an easy sell that it organically became the tool of choice for would-be leaders. Worse even, once the former opposition got to power they tore down what was built by the predecessor, started over to shape it in their image, brought in their cronies. This is human nature, the US didn't invent short sightedness or gullibility, they just exploited and monetized these common flaws in people. |
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| ▲ | Hikikomori 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or you get trump, autocrat corruption without the planning. | | |
| ▲ | ithkuil 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can get those in a democracy too! The real difference is how can you get rid of those | |
| ▲ | close04 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Or you get That "or" is described one paragraph down. It's the most common type of autocracy actually because it's the easiest to pull off. Incompetent and corrupt leader, access to an army, biggest temptation is for easy profit. Democracies are very susceptible to this type of leader in the short term. They start as populists and for a while it's easy to fool people into electing them. Until pockets and bellies start to stay empty. When popular support vanishes the army might step in to take that role and it turns into an autocracy. Successful planned economies need first and foremost a competent leader who's not tempted by short term personal gain but mainly long term gains for the country. They're rare as hen's teeth. | | |
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| ▲ | alansaber 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Certain fundamental technologies are national security. If you proport to be a superpower you can't have your nation be fully reliant on say the Mac OS. Same with agricultural imports, IC development, dot dot dot | |
| ▲ | corimaith 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No it's more of the US tolerating asymmetric trade. The whole point of that trade article was that Japan couldn't afford to loose the US market. |
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| ▲ | Aperocky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is it luck or bold product and marketing decision? Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight. | |
| ▲ | close04 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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 Who in the third world is supposed to speak Korean? | | |
| ▲ | jdw64 an hour ago | parent [-] | | In this case, I'd appreciate it if you could understand it as my 'native language.' When you input a language that isn't English into a computer, it often doesn't work well with ASCII—it frequently breaks in many places. Because the standards for computer work are mostly set by the US, people in Asia often call the ASCII system 'the privilege of one byte.' A single hardware switch maps directly to one byte of memory. You don't need an IME—Linux requires programmers to configure that manually. For native languages like Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, you can't just type characters onto the screen directly. IME daemons like ibus or fcitx run in the background, intercept key events, and compose them in buffers. In that regard, Windows is much better. And this ties in well with the topic of this post Using Linux outside the English speaking world means you have to study encoding history and filesystem structures just to open a document. It practically becomes a hobby. It's awful. But Windows solves that problem first, because it wants to sell Windows in those countries. NTFS stores filenames in UTF-16, so multilingual input is standard. When you open a terminal in Linux, you get the horrible experience of seeing your native language rendered as broken characters. I do use Linux, of course. I think its lightweight nature is a plus, but in my work environment, Linux is hard to use properly except on servers |
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| ▲ | skeledrew 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | max979 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | eloisant an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jmorenoamor 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | PlunderBunny 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some of the ideas for BTRON sound (to my naive understanding) like OpenDoc. Can anyone familiar with OpenDoc comment? |
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| ▲ | ktallett 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jdw64 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | readthenotes1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | socalgal2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Zecc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The title is certainly clickbait-y. But the content is still interesting. And not sloppy. | | |
| ▲ | eloisant an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Lagoon3384_SWE 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This "USA and CIA is the reason X failed" conspiracy again... its usually "communism" and THIS time it will be good we promise! |
