
Japan's Homegrown Operating System - jacquesm
http://web-jpn.org/trends/science/sci030522.html
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omouse
I don't get it. Why would you use a real-time operating system on embedded
devices? The devices they list aren't smart-phones but are appliances that
only have a single purpose, thus you can code directly for that purpose and
completely avoid the overhead of an operating system.

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patio11
I think you underestimate the needs of products on the Japanese consumer
electronics market.

Take the remote control for a karaoke machine. Do you have a mental image of
what that looks like? Does your mental image look something like an American
TV remote control? Good -- your mental image is accurate as of about 1989.

In 2009, a karaoke machine remote control has Wifi to download the song lyrics
that it displays inline, a search engine available in four languages,
integration with the mike and system so that it can grade you on your vocal
performance without your coworkers seeing if you failed, top 100 charts
updated monthly for the last year and yearly for the last decade or so, etc,
etc.

Would you like to code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the
overhead of an operating system? ;)

(In actual fact, most Japanese electronics are one-offs though. _sigh_ I thank
God every day that I took the job in Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps instead
of embedded devices.)

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mark_h
Does anyone here have any experience with TRON? (I didn't realise it was open-
sourced before) Every few years I read an article about it, and it's obviously
not going away. I'm also vaguely curious if there has been much/any uptake
outside of Japan.

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Rawsock
TRON is rarely used outside of Japan because the specification documents are
mostly in Japanese. TRON is more like an industry standard for an embedded
RTOS than a concrete implementation. Of course, some open-source code is
available, but these are reference implementations. More info:

<http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/itron.html>

~~~
anigbrowl
Opportunity knocks! I had heard of this way back when but always assumed it
had died when the US was lobbying the Japanese government to scale back MITI.

Does anyone else remember MSX? Looks like it never quite went away.

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malkia
The Sony Playstation 2 SDK had functions that resembled the TRON OS (thread,
event & message system). It even had the fixed thread priorities and such.

