 What if I told you there is an immensely popular operating system that you likely used it at least once, but did not realise what it was? In fact, it is so popular and important there is an IEEE standard based on it. It is uncanny how immensely popular AND immensely obscure this system is. It is scary that until today I have never even heard of its reference desktop implementation. The system is called "TRON". 🧵 thread~ p.s. thanks @fkinoshita for the pointer!   78 comments
The installer partitions and formats the disk, asks whether you want full setup (all fonts) or minimal setup (less fonts), copies the files, and invites you to remove the floppy from the drive 0 and reboot.  @mmu_man This system often gives me BeOS vibes, but from what I can tell from old photos, this UI probably was in TRON since late 80s. So, who copied whom? :) First launch. The system is booting, and it is quite fast. Before we can begin, we should answer a few simple questions. Do we want BTRON style settings or Windows style settings? I am curious how things are in BTRON, but not enough to set it to non-Windows and get lost/confused.  @nina_kali_nina if there are different fonts installed, would be nice to see what sort of variation in Kanji style is available. Or maybe it's just more sizes of (unscaled) bitmap fonts. @drj here are more or less all the fonts available in the text editor. Some of the font options looked just like other options, but used Chinese versions of kanji instead of Japanese ones. @nina_kali_nina aha, nice to see. Line 2 is "that crappy Roman Latin font that seems to be ubiquitous among Japanese phototypesetters" spaced badly/full-kanji-width. @nina_kali_nina tbh, i don't know. i don't do Kanji font recognition; was going off the Latin part. But just on the basis of its ubiquity, Mincho would be a good guess. @nina_kali_nina oh it uses maru instead of checkmark for confirmation. makes sense  @nina_kali_nina hmm if this system is so ubiquitous, we need to ask the important question: does TRON fight for the Users? @nina_kali_nina Thank you so much for this great overview! @nina_kali_nina have you tried pasting the selected drawing into the text editor? there's some pretty strange embedding things on the system! @fkinoshita I haven't, but I imagine it will work similarly to OLE in Windows 3.1, where an app will be embedded inside of an app! @nina_kali_nina Yes, you can even embedded the webpages and it preserves all links inside it! @nina_kali_nina @fkinoshita It's kind of similar, but unlike OLE, every file is also a directory and actually contains all the documents linked into it more or less. It's similar to how hard links work on Unix, although the name is associated with the inode equivalent (the real object), not the directory entry equivalent (virtual object a.k.a. link record) @nina_kali_nina unixemu is a system program (basically a kernel module), not a user program. It only implements Unix API compatibility, and not a shell environment. A Unix shell environment with development tools can be found at http://www.chokanji.com/developer/download.html (specifically selfenv.bin). Once you've installed it, you can run /SYS/ucli from the console to get a Unix shell, although it's a bit limited @andreww thank you for the explanation! This is what I expected. Kind of sad they didn't put it on the CD, there was still plenty space left. Also, curiously, the 4.5 release looks just like 1.1 release https://www.os-museum.com/brightv/brightv.htm p.s. Thank you for your OS archival and museum efforts :) @nina_kali_nina B-right/V's appearance barely changed across versions, with probably the biggest change being the wallpaper. Even the last version of its 16-bit predecessor, 1B/V3, looks pretty similar (although 1B/V1 and 1B/V2 were much flatter). AFAIK there were some major changes between B-right/V versions that weren't immediately obvious (for instance, B-right/V R2 a.k.a. Chokanji 1 added support for all codepoints of the TRON character set and Chokanji 4 added shared libraries) @nina_kali_nina Here's Chokanji 4, which is very similar to Chokanji V (AFAIK the biggest changes in V are the VMware guest enhancements and a different beginner's guide)  @nina_kali_nina @eichin @nina_kali_nina    @nina_kali_nina this and the way window management is done via right click gives me very plan9 vibes i wonder if someone at bell labs used a system like this. @lily I think both are based on Xerox PARC concepts. The author of the OS mentions that he saw Alto and was majorly inspired, but couldn't work on related concepts at first due to politics @nina_kali_nina time for a cup of tea; does it really take that long? In the 1990s, for Garbage Collection purposes, we joked about having a range of mouse-wait icons for various expected GC pause times: wristwatch / cup-of-tea / bedtime / star-exploding. @nina_kali_nina I have both Chokanji 4 and V running in QEMU 5.2.0. 4 installs fine without any special considerations. The issue with V is that Chokanji's VMware driver doesn't get along with QEMU's limited and somewhat broken implementation of the VMport. Disabling the VMport by using the -M pc,vmport=off option to QEMU fixes the VMport incompatibility (4 lacks the VMware driver). The only other QEMU-related issue I've found is the floppy doesn't work so you have to boot from CD  @nina_kali_nina i knew that nspire and bada OS were running on *nucleus* Why is the tron name never mentioned? @f4grx because TRON is more of a specification, and I guess it is obscure enough to not mention it outside of devs. Wikipedia does mention TRON a few times on Nucleus RTOS page.  @nina_kali_nina Since TRON is more of an architectural specification than a concrete OS implementation, I’m guessing these have way more differences than similarities. Was there a common (presumably commercial) ancestor for most TRONs, or is it really a diversity of OSes sharing a common specification? @bytex64 there's a bunch of open-source kernels that work on very wide range of hardware, from 8051 to RP2040, and the license allows using the code mostly free, it seems.  @nina_kali_nina oh wow that takes me back. My first job out of college was at Mentor Graphics working on the networking stack and their internal openSSL. I doubt it's available anywhere but they had a solution for running Nucleus on top off Windows. Not an emulator but an API shim like Wine. @kevingranade thank you for your work! I've been using Nucleus-based phones from 2005 to 2010 and absolutely loved them. Sadly, very few manufacturers released API for their phones back then or even allowed installing native applications, but mine did ;p  @nina_kali_nina oh hey! me and @techfury did a talk at rC3 about some OSes, including TRON (showing CKV/BTRON specifically): https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost @nina_kali_nina I knew about TRON but didn't know there was a desktop version. Also, the kitties and wait cursor are adorable.   @nina_kali_nina @fkinoshita @thomholwerda There was a video demo at the Chaos Computer Congress a couple of years ago: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost It was widely discussed at the time, e.g. I knew of TRON and iTRON but this was the first time I saw video. Although I know a few words of Nihongo, I can't read worth a damn, so I can't try it for myself. This makes me sad. |
Gregory's Server
Well, to be more precise, the system I am about to show you is called B-right/V release 4.5 from 2006. It is an implementation of BTRON, Business TRON specification. You can think about it this way: FreeBSD is a UNIX system. Bright/V is a TRON system.
TRON, or The Real-time Operating system Nucleus, began as an open architecture project by Japanese professor Ken Sakamura in 1984. There are multiple sub-projects, including ITRON for electronics and cars, BTRON for desktops and PDAs, CTRON for telecoms, and many more.
There is a lot of information on its English website http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/homepage.html but it barely scratches the surface.
Yes, TRON was used for NTT DoCoMo i-mode phones and some Roland synthesisers, and most camera operating systems are also TRON forks. Yes, it runs on pretty much any 8, 16 or 32 bit architecture you can think of. Yes, it was used in home automation and cars, too.
But this system is also the basis for Mentor Graphics Nucleus RTOS, and eCos and RTEMS APIs, and that makes it BIG.
Well, to be more precise, the system I am about to show you is called B-right/V release 4.5 from 2006. It is an implementation of BTRON, Business TRON specification. You can think about it this way: FreeBSD is a UNIX system. Bright/V is a TRON system.
TRON, or The Real-time Operating system Nucleus, began as an open architecture project by Japanese professor Ken Sakamura in 1984. There are multiple sub-projects, including ITRON for electronics and cars, BTRON for desktops and PDAs, CTRON for telecoms,...