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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
You're confusing "ally" and "vassal". Allies are countries that send troops to help you in war.
Whereas vassals are countries that you draft to help you in war?
> 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.
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.
Is it luck or bold product and marketing decision?
Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight.
apparently China decision to ban US tech company and build their own counterpart is seen as Genius after 20 years
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yeah but China have death penalty for corruption while Trump literally selling subscription for faster tweet access
> 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.
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.
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
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?
"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
Did you forget about what happened with Hong Kong?
He's probably forbidden from speaking about it.
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.
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.
Or you get trump, autocrat corruption without the planning.
You can get those in a democracy too!
The real difference is how can you get rid of those
> 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.
>Democracies are very susceptible
Some democracies for sure, having a US style president makes it much easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_rule
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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
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...
Youre kidding! That's a great fact. Do you have a source for that joycon part?
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
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?
And we can blame greed of a Japanese man for actually causing the failure
Was it greed? Or was it a unified vision?
If you're referring to Masayoshi Son he's Korean by ethnicity, Japanese by nationality.
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.
Some of the ideas for BTRON sound (to my naive understanding) like OpenDoc. Can anyone familiar with OpenDoc comment?
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
The title is certainly clickbait-y. But the content is still interesting. And not sloppy.