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...
｢ ＴＨＥ ＦＵＴＵＲＥ ｣
The OS is still around as uITRON. It's... very Japanese, which is why you'll find it inside a ton of Japanese IT gear and very little else. For most people the closest they'll get to it is in printers from Japanese companies. I've seen a derivative, NORTi, in a few products made in places like Brazil but that's about it.
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 US government is one hell of a moat.
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.
That's not "hype".
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.
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)
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.
As sovereign citizens of their own country, Ukrainians have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity. I believe they have made that choice clear through democratic means, something Russians have not experienced in a long time. If Russia is allowed to take Ukraine, it will move on to Poland next, and then to claim the remaining former Soviet states. A line must be drawn somewhere.
Much like Iran. And yet we took out their leadership just this year (again) because we think they picked the wrong flag.
Apparently such behaviour is tolerable. If it is tolerable, we should tolerate the Russians doing it too, even if it is on their own border instead of the other side of the world.
No, it was incredibly stupid for the US to do so, everyone who has done more than a cursory look at the results of wargames and previous interventions knew this. It wasn't even a good idea in Iraq with Saddam Hussein (second time, the first at least was to stop him invading Kuwait), probably not even Afghanistan.
And yet there are no sanctions against the US for its obviously reckless interference in other countries.
I guess "tolerable" has more than one meaning, so I should have checked which one was intended before starting my previous comment with just plain "No", but before reading your reply I hadn't considered that.
The lack of sanctions is due to how power works rather than anyone else agreeing with them in any specific case: the USA has got too much of the money that everyone else wants, and too many weapons which everyone else wants pointed in the right direction rather than to find they're now standing in a position to read the sign saying "front towards enemy" with a wire trailing off to a nearby bush.
This does not change that it was incredibly stupid for the US to attack Iran in particular, so stupid that it cost the US a significant part of its own matériel, made the remaining matériel less scary as a threat, and reduced the economic relevance of the USA's money, all at the same time.
Every US leader before Trump made sure to not damage those things, and thus retained both hard and soft power. Trump's throwing both away rapidly, at such a pace that it's no longer inconceivable that the rest of the world will be able to sanction the US without fear of what retaliation may result. Consider that Trump's poor choices mean in particular that the EU got away with telling Trump to take a hike over Greenland, and China got away with telling Trump to take a hike over tariffs. With the kind of damage he's doing to the USA's power, this shift may be shockingly sudden when it does happen, with nobody being able to see exactly how close the transition is even 12 months before the world order changes. (I am not saying this is 12 months away today, I'm saying nobody will know even when it is 12 months away).
So, stuff is shifting today specifically because of the USA's "reckless interference in other countries", with emphasis on the "reckless" part. There is a degree of governmental tolerance for the "interference" part, out of fear, meaning the condemnation (such as it is) is somewhere between "toothless" and simply not joining in with the misadventures. Trump appears to be trying to punish every nation who didn't help him attack Iran, but between them and all the nations the US failed to defend from Iranian counterstrikes are rather a lot of nations who are all now looking to each other for military and economic collaborations.
It may not look much on paper; it remains to be seen if it is much in practice. China will of course be happy to substitute for the USA everywhere, but for the rest of us this changes which hyperpower we find ourselves forced to kowtow to, this time less metaphorically and more literally. Reasonable chance a lot of nations make their own nuclear deterrents either way, with all the extra risk that comes with. I didn't want to predict anything past 2031 even before all this geopolitical rifting started.
You’re on HackerNews, this website attracts free thinkers, we’re not the group that our influenced easily by propaganda, open your mind, read some data, visit the country and then form an opinion. Dont parrot the propaganda of non-free media.
I don't need to read our media (that's perfectly free, thanks for your concern), to have an opinion about Russia. Especially on this very day.
It's always amusing to hear this and point out what some Ukrainians are... not equal to other Ukrainians and therefore are not allowed to have the right to decide under which flag they want to collectively pursue peace and prosperity.
Somehow it's always only one flag what is 'right' and anything other is 'not right'.
And that's even without statements like "it's really obvious that Russia fakes votes".
As for the US - you could say we had two kerfuffles along these lines, or we'd still be Brits. Win some, lose some. And notably we probably would have also lost against the Brits if not for the French. Granted they didn't then try to take us under their wing as part of France, so the similarities end somewhere - but on the other hand that might have indeed been the exact outcome had we been majority ethnic French. Kind of an amusing parallel timeline to imagine.
It became 'majority Russian' 50 years before that, pay attention to the bar labeled 10. Don't use BBC as a source of anything.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea
In the case of the South though, I believe they could have had a peaceful secession had they not fallen victim to their own version of the "sphere of influence" argument: they refused to tolerate a free North to which slaves could escape, resulting in opening fire on Fort Sumter.
An example of "valid" secession is the split of Czechoslovakia.
"Peaceful" is introducing a what-if about whether and why the Confederacy started the actual armed conflict part of the secession.
I have introduced a line break into the original comment as a demilitarized zone.
(we can also see the sort of "historical sliding window" effect as to legitimacy here. At what point does de facto line on the ground become baked in to legitimacy? Does California have a right to exist? Clearly more so than the occupation of Crimea, but is it just time that makes it so?)
They didn't actually say that, though I can see how one might read it that way.
valid cases for secession. In the case of the South though
It's like Al Gore "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" being taken as "I invented" rather than "This was invented, I took the initiative in supporting it when that happened".
Unfortunately for Ukraine, Russia is still strong enough to count as a sovereign nation, Russia is not yet weak enough that it is unable to prevent others (Ukraine) from telling them (Russia) to stop throwing high velocity explosives over the border. That had too many negatives in a row, I hope I phrased that right.
According to what idea of "sensible"?
> encourage a Ukrainian surrender early on and send them some food/whatnot in a care package, then fortify the Polish border.
This would still have resulted in millions of refugees, plus some unknown number of people killed by Russian forces exterminating any local pro-Europe political supporters. Remember Euromaidan. It also snuffs out a democracy, which is not a good precedent to set.
The second motivation is the belief that the invasion, if permitted, will not stop at Ukraine. This is why Finland and Sweden joined NATO after it happened.
> Keeping a conflict worthy of WWII smouldering in the area for more than 4 years now?
Russia can retreat into their internationally recognized borders at any time.
> Can we please be honest about our motivations here?
Can we be honest about the motivations of Russia in capturing and annexing other countries, something forbidden by both the post-WW2 international order and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum (which also justifies Europe's security provision to Ukraine)?
The US has around 900 military bases abroad. Far more than all other countries combined. These bases are a constant source of threats and bullying, deploying and projecting a GDP largely based on death and destruction. Why don't the US retreat into their internationally recognized borders?
(Some exceptions apply for e.g. the Chagossians)
In case of United States Army installations in Germany:
" The legal status of Americans stationed in Germany is governed by special international agreements including the NATO Status of Forces Agreement.
People stationed at overseas bases or posts must remember German laws apply to them, too. To protect yourself, know what rights you have as an American. Whether German authorities exercise their right of jurisdiction depends on the circumstances of the case. "
https://www.ramstein.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Articl...
In case of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base:
"At the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2013, Cuba's Foreign Minister demanded the U.S. return the base to Cuba."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base#Cold...
Another special case is the UK sovereign bases in Cyprus, which really are UK territory; I only know about those because during Brexit they kept getting mentioned in the treaty documents.
Bonus pull out sovereignty section: to whom does Transnistria belong? How about Nagorno-Karabakh?
Mostly they were allowed there by the government of the place.
They are criticised for the exceptions.
> GDP largely based on death and destruction
For all the flaws of the USA, this is not really what their GDP is "based on", though perhaps one could say that functionally they hide conscription by giving many unemployed men a Hobson's choice of signing up vs. going hungry.
Which, with 20/20 hindsight, we now know was wild paranoia. The Russians weren't even geared up to properly invade Ukraine, they were as shocked as the rest of us when the Ukrainians decided a land war in Asia was a better idea than surrender. They spent something like 2 years back in 2022-2024 retooling for a real war. They weren't preparing to take Poland, they were trying to preserve a sphere of influence in Ukraine.
A Russian motivation that has held up remarkably well in hindsight as we start to get a better idea of the fear and hate motivating Europe and what NATO thinks their strategic objectives are vis-a-vis Russia.
They might well end up in a war with Poland now after NATO has spent 4 years in this Slavocidal posture, but it wasn't on the cards before we embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
> Can we be honest about the motivations of Russia in capturing and annexing other countries, something forbidden by both the post-WW2 international order and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum (which also justifies Europe's security provision to Ukraine)?
I mean, yeah? Everyone acknowledges that except a couple of the UN delegations. Send them a strongly worded letter, that works on the US sometimes. It isn't normal for a major to break international law and it ends up in a million-casualty war where we sponsor bombing runs on their capital.
But if we aren't honest about our own motivations then we end up in situations like this one, where there is a major war and there doesn't seem to be any reason to be provoking and sustaining it. It has been disastrous policy. We shouldn't have done it, we shouldn't have continued it and we should stop it now. We're just pushing the global centre of power towards Asia.
Them being idiots and thinking they could take Ukraine does not preclude that they were also idiots who thought they could take Poland.
> we embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
We, the people who are supplying Ukraine with support, and I want to emphasise this, have not embarked on this poorly advised policy of war. We are not at war, our soldiers are not fighting. We are selling (and giving) weapons to someone who wants to defend themselves, which is a standard thing for weapon-exporting nations to do.
Russia has embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
> It isn't normal for a major to break international law and it ends up in a million-casualty war where we sponsor bombing runs on their capital.
Russia did bombing runs on the Ukrainian capital before Ukraine was able to respond.
Can you give Ukrainians a reason why they should not develop nuclear weapons? The Polish? The Lithuanians?
> We're just pushing the global centre of power towards Asia.
Only if "we" is "the Russian government".
The things which the rest of NATO is doing that can be described as "pushing the global centre of power towards Asia" are 75% Trump being a chaos monkey undermining both the USA itself and all the USA's alliances, and 25% the EU member-states bike-shedding union-wide economic-industrial policy.
I for one welcome the re-establishment of a nuclear armed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Just as long as we don't get the Hapsburgs back again.
(nb to audience and mods: this is a joke, which probably doesn't belong at the bottom of a serious thread about the Ukraine war and definitely not on a discussion of Japanese operating systems, yet here we are)
Don't worry, if anyone can't tell their arse from their elbows long enough to gain power, it's the line so inbred that neither can anyone else.
Stopping the Iran war via total withdrawal might work like that. Western surrender in the Ukraine war (which, we need to keep reminding you, the first actual shots were in all cases fired by Russia) results in a situation far worse.
The bombing runs on Moscow will continue as long as the bombing runs on Kyiv continue. It is absurd to pretend that Russia are somehow agencyless dupes of US policy because you don't like the idea that Putin doesn't care how many Russians are killed so long as he retains power.
Everything Russia touches becomes more corrupt. That includes Hungary btw. And speaking about it, that includes Ukraine - anti Russians politics was also the anti-corruption politics.
> 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.
Imagine if the British had responded this way to the invasion of Poland in WW2.
Worse: which side of the border is Auschwitz located?
> It is also one of the very few paths that could reasonably see Poland or countries in that general region getting nuked.
Ukraine had nukes, gave them up. Was probably sensible at the time, but the observed behaviour is now "having nukes means you don't get invaded, giving them up means you do". Russia invading at all is pushing nations more in the direction of getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia.
(Also, but entirely separately, Trump's USA sabre-rattling over Canada, Greenland, war with Iran, and disengagement from previous allies everywhere, is pushing nations the same way but to deter the USA(!) or China).
« getting their own nuclear arsenals to deter Russia » – Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects, and to draw a line; not “democratically” on women and children as the US did, of course (in truth the US used a kind of napalm, poison gas, pumpkin bombs, flash bombs, and coloured smoke bombs, see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer). “Nukes” are just an elaborate deception created from 1945 through the 1950s, basically in maintenance mode ever since.
Other than being at war with the nation who had allied themselves with the USSR's joint invasion of Poland?
Also, why even ask? It's not like the post-WW2 international order was good for the Polish. Failing to defend Poland from the USSR, regardless of how this can be attributed to war exhaustion or foolishly believing Stalin's word, doesn't make that failure good.
Failing to defend Ukraine now, would be like failing to defend Poland then.
> And what was their “response” when confronted with reports of Polish atrocities against Germans in “Western/Northern Poland” during the August crisis?
I had to look this up. I think I know what you are now. Someone in the modern age who has the benefit of hindsight calling what was actually done an "atrocity", using the framing of the invader which we now know to have been exaggerated for propaganda to create a casus belli, says something very specific about their worldview.
> Stuck in the 20th century? Everyone can see that nukes don't work, else Russia would have used them in March '22, on military objects
Tell that to Russia. They keep threatening the use of them against everyone who aids Ukraine.
Their nukes may or may not work. But they're definitely afraid of other people's nukes.
And also definitely, the USA is afraid of other people's nukes.
> see “Hiroshima revisited” by Michael Palmer
Jesus, you're also a conspiracy theorist?
We have film footage of plenty of nukes past the 50s, the physics isn't particularly fancy, and with that era's stealth technology Japan would have been unable to avoid noticing the kind of airforce capable of delivering that kind of destruction by conventional means.
« USA is afraid of other people's nukes » – And of extraterrestrians, too. It's all just propaganda playing back in people's minds.
« conspiracy theorist? » – The book I referenced has lots of hard empirical facts, notably the medical details, which the author is professionally qualified to assess.
« film footage » – Huge quantities of explosives, WWII production kept going. As for Japan, their gov had to collaborate somehow, and eventually resigned themselves to do so because the US wouldn't accept their capitulation and instead kept democratically napalming women and children.
I can't tell if you're a tankie or a bot but Russia is right now conducting an unprovoked war against a democracy with no foreign policy goal other than to destroy Ukraine and seize its assets.
Where Russia has been forced out of Ukraine it's left behind war crimes and mass civilian graves. So experience shows, there is no safe surrender for Ukraine, they have to fight until they win.
There is no world where Putin's Russia is the good guys.
Remember, Putin is the only person with the luxury of stopping the war any time he likes.
Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia) are way more anti-Russia than the ones in the US.
You also do have to keep track of internal factions. We're all, me included, using "country name" in this thread as a synechdoche as if all of a country had a unified political axis of action, when we know that's an oversimplification.
This is how we get Israel/Likud and Iran/IGRC who are practically co-evolved to escalate against each other, to which the only reasonable response of third parties is to acknowledge that both are bad and attempt to de-escalate, as in e.g. the Camp David Accords era, before either of those factions came to power.
> Right-wingers in Eastern Europe (who aren't obviously paid by Russia)
I don't think enough was made of https://newrepublic.com/post/209035/hungary-prime-minister-v... - the amount of money involved was a significant fraction of the Hungarian budget.
Also I've yet to meet a single person who was "pro-palestine" and simultaneously sympathetic to russia. Quite the opposite.
Of course as you say there's also people trying to lump the many "we should stop mass murder of civilians" people into the same bucket as the negatively polarized "we hate Israel therefore we're going to support Iran" few. Discourse is exhaustingly stupid.
https://kyivindependent.com/pro-palestinian-activists-destro...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7x68jrdmlo
https://time.com/6589923/nancy-pelosi-pro-palestinian-protes...
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/russias-...
And this isn't counting the countless TikTok influencers, trade unions, etc... that are all anti-"war" and have pro-IRGC and pro-China views.
And while you're kind of right that few are outright carrying water for Russia, at least publicly, they all conveniently support what Russia supports.
The average joe in the US (and presumably the west more generally) does not care one whit about the causes of russia or iran.
It's not about caring about Russia or Iran specifically. It's about the fact they're swayed by propaganda so the end result is they end up unwittingly adopting the worldview pushed by enemy propagandists and helping to destroy western civilization.
Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests. It's also directly representative of my own interests. The fact that some subset of people will be swayed by propaganda does not constitute a valid argument against a given position.
If we uniformly apply the same standard you're demonstrating here then your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society.
tl;dr You're espousing anti-intellectual BS that has no place on HN. Kindly take your braindead political takes back to twitter or wherever the hell they came from.
ChatGPT write this?
> Sure, my wondering "why are we burning billions in iran" happens to align with iran's interests
So naturally you're against lots of other programs that waste billions? Or just this one?
> your own position would be attributed to being swayed by state propaganda and thus your actions interpreted as helping american propagandists destroy civil society
Except my position is pro-west and anti-terrorist supporting dictatorships. It's the old duck test: if it walks like a duck...
And for the record, I'm against both sides of the horseshoe who are bought by enemy propaganda...
Somewhat cynically it's entirely to do with which country they attacked. Had they moved on one farther away from mainland europe I doubt we'd have heard nearly as much about it.
That said it would still be wrong just as much of US (and yes Chinese) foreign policy is morally wrong. Such should be called out rather than engaging in whataboutism.
The moral arguments for doing that appear to all be rank hypocrisy given what we tolerate of ourselves. So if we go back and accept a certain level of cynicism when asking "why?" what exactly is the upside for us in Ukraine? The downsides seem to be enormous and when pushed for what the actual reasons are the best people have seems flimsy and poorly thought out in relation to the risks. This war could have been approached as though it was the US or China who had instigating it and ended with a call-out as opposed to millions of casualties.
The winning strategy in these things seems to me to be much more of the Chinese approach where you sit tight, set up an impressive defensive perimeter and grow your economy until all your opponents bankrupt themselves in stupid wars.
US was basically supporting Russian invasion in negotiations. What are you on about here.
EU is supporting Ukraine in their self defense. Eu also know they are the next if Ukraine falls. USA did the right thing in the beginning, but as Trump gained power, his admiration to autocrats made him switch the sides.
The think tank argument is very valid though. You can no longer find "Project for the new American Century" online, but they laid out the invasion of Iraq before 9/11 (the pretext) even happened.
On the other hand distance from Kaliningrad to Berlin is just 618 km, 384 mi or 333.94 nmi.
https://metro.co.uk/2025/06/17/russia-upgrades-nuclear-sites...
Geopolitics 101 also says that in a war between countries armed with ICBMs delivering nuclear weapons, distance doesn't matter, everyone dies. Especially with second-strike capability like Dead Hand (Sistema "Perimetr").
(P.S.: Xi Jin Ping is as unelected as the British Prime Minister, but I don't see people calling the UK a dictatorship.)
In that same period Xi has changed the rules so that he can hold on to power indefinitely.
(Neither Britain nor Germany have term limits for their head of government, so China removing its term limit is just bringing it at par with the two most prominent European democracies)
The British PM was elected, what on earth are you talking about? He won an election to his seat in Parliament just a few weeks ago.
British law doesn't even require the Prime Minister to be an MP, technically Parliament could elect any random bozo from the street to be PM.
But that’s not necessary or expected under the British system, being an MP and Party Leader is enough. If Burnham radically departed from Labour’s manifesto you could then argue he call a general election to establish legitimacy for that, but it isn’t required.
"Deng Xiaoping put the limits in place in the 1980s as part of his effort to ensure that China was never again subjected to a crushing dictatorship like that of Chairman Mao and the turmoil it occasioned. China’s Communist system not accepting the Western notion of formal checks and balances, Deng instituted a system with Chinese characteristics designed to prevent return of one-man rule or a cult of personality by preventing leaders from staying indefinitely in power."
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/7-things-you-need-to-know...
Similar in Russia, 2020 constitutional amendment gave Vladimir Putin legal authority to stay in office until 2036.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_limits_in_Russia#Russia_u...
I think it's a safe bet that China will invade precisely when they think this won't cause them severe negative losses.
This will likely be when Taiwan finds itself no longer a close ally of the USA, nor of global geostrategic importance.
Of course, "safe bet" doesn't mean "in all possible timelines"; they may end up echoing the Bay of Pigs, Hormuz, or stumble against the hubris that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand into a world war where all belligerents had the mistaken belief they would win.
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.
And the stronger state exercises a lot of influence on the weaker state, especially in terms of foreign policy, and potentially provides it with protection from other strong states.
Not sure exactly how much this would apply to Taiwan in particular, but I think the idea in general can be meaningful in modern politics.
You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80s the PC market was still pretty new. Business was still run on IBM mainframes, DEC VAX, and other systems that were overtaken by forces in the late-80s and early 90s. These seemed unstoppable until they weren’t.
I think the strongest counter example, though, is probably Linux. If your thesis was correct, an early-90s hobby operating system by some kid at a uni in Finland would never be dominant in cloud server spaces by the 2000s.
> Amiga couldn't over come the PC.
This is probably your best example. I would add BeOS to this.
On the other hand, Apple managed to attract a core audience and stay alive (even if barely) through the 90s. Sometimes you don’t have to overtake; you just need to have a solid niche.
> IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2.
OS/2 originally lost to Windows as a successor to DOS due to execution, not because Windows had a huge moat. OS/2 Warp was a bit later.
The story of OS/2 failing is sad and as much about IBM internal politics as about Microsoft succeeding.
> Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium.
Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s (and possibly today) and didn’t seem to understand that most business applications at the time were limited by branching and integer computations. That stuff doesn’t vectorize well. The arch might be better-received today, although moving pipeline concerns to the compiler still seems like a bad choice to me.
As a counterpoint, consider the rise of ARM in the 2010s. An arch known mostly in the embedded world has become a real player in the desktop and server environment. All because of the rise of phones, reasonable licensing, and better perf/watt at low power than x86.
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.
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.
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.
For example Jack Ma reappeared after his successful re-education.
Though it is still interesting to research about Industry politics. In Europe almost all economics looked trapped into the capitalism Vs socialism trap.
This is a funny thing to say about a system known for its regular issuance of 5-year plans. They have festivals and everything.
while US flip flopping about invading middle east (like usual) or Greenland
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?
he is implying that China bad action can be solved by PL red Army
If you think he's wrong then tell me - what do you believe would happen there in the event of widespread social unrest or grievances against the sitting government?
I see this question a lot and as someone who has traveled to and sometimes lived in Hong Kong for the past 20 years, the truth is on a day-to-day level, there isn’t really much change.
I’m sure if you’re an activist there are huge changes. But as a regular person, life feels the same (even my local and expat friends feel this way).
Also one thing to be clear about is Hong Kong never had a democracy. The governor was always appointed by the UK. It was only when the handover was certain, the UK tried to introduce voting. The UK also tried to pressure Portugal to stop giving citizenship to the people of Macau, because the UK didn’t want to do the same for Hongkongers.
Only part of Hong Kong, the New Territories, was leased from China. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to the UK in perpetuality.
The UK didn't have to give them back but it also didn't have a reliable fresh water supply for such a large city that didn't depend on mainland China.
PRC is legally fully compliant with her UNCLOS accession obligations.
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.
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.
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.
The real difference is how can you get rid of those
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.
Some democracies for sure, having a US style president makes it much easier.
Similarly if your were to look into food delivery companies/ridehailing you would also find many countries where Uber has completely failed.
When you talk to e.g. Republicans about policies like universal healthcare or mass transit, what you realize is that they're not opposed to the policies themselves, they're just convinced that it will benefit others more than themselves. A lot of people chock that up as them being hateful (which is an easy and sometimes true explanation, as right-wing politicians and media stoke this to capture them as voters), but the core of the problem is that they are often convinced that any system structured like this will be denied to them when they try to access it (and if you've been obtaining medical care via patient-hostile private insurance your entire, it's probably hard to imagine otherwise).
And it sucks because this low-trust social system ruins things even in low-level shitty ways, like people cutting in line, or destroying free neighborhood food pantries or libraries, or driving like assholes.
"Someone else will exploit it if I don't" is both a justification used by some people for their own shitty behavior, AND something that turns people against anything not being forcibly controlled or structured to prevent that exploitation (I.e. anything communal or democratized). This is why the myth of the "welfare queen" was so easy for Fox to sell.
Authoritarianism also heavily degrades societal trust, though it's certainly not the only thing that does this. Capitalism does as well, because it offers the same incentives to exploit (the aforementioned "do it or have it be done to you").
They're both systems that live and die on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Being first could be luck, or it can be foresight.
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.
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.
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.
This hasn't been my experience for the last 5 years or so. Obscure old printers and scanners, Bluetooth headphones with modern codecs like LDAC and SBC-XQ, RGB gaming mice all "just work" on Linux, where on Windows I have to install an app from the Microsoft Store to get functionality.
I think this was probably pretty accurate in the early 2010s and before.
Who in the third world is supposed to speak Korean?
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
Anyway, it's been mostly fixed now, but if I remember correctly, there were cases where edge cases caused crashes because the input standards were inconsistent
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
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.
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.
I laud what TRON tried to do, but I don't think they had it right. They made the encoding too complex (especially for the 1990s) while Unicode offered a single Basic Multilingual Plane. Unicode quickly got complex too (mostly due to the mistake of adopting UCS2 and then repurposing that as UTF16 and adding surrogates, and later getting a little bit over the top with combining emojis), but TRON was complex in other ways. If you mixed both Chinese and Japanese in a single documents, you had a multiple encodings to care about and control characters to switch between them. Suddenly, the character encoding is not stateless anymore. You can say the same about Unicode, but the statefulness of UTF-8 or UTF-16 is local and easily recoverable. Same goes for the statefulness combining diacritics, and bidirectional markers (which are rarely used) only affect the display. TRON code plane switches, as far as I understand, mean that even a simple text search or regex search would stop working and need to be completely redesigned, since it now has to be aware of which language we're reading right now! That's a big break, as you say.
> 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.
Only if they're very old and born before or during the war or its not their legal name. The Japanese government restricts the Kanji that can be used in names to Jōyō kanji (regular use kanji) and Jinmeiyō kanji (personal name kanji). Together they add up to roughly 3000 kanji. The list was back in 1991 when Unicode 1.0 was released, but it did include all of them, and many more, as did previous Japanese standards that predated TRON like JIS X 0208. I feel like the "people can't write their name" was always a bit of cope. Japan is still the country of "the nail that sticks out gets hammered". If your name falls outside of the legally allowed list of Kanji, you'll suffer even if you're running BTRON.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...
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)
Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993
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.
Given the current US debt situation, Japan is in a position to dictate its local manufacturing terms and actually do what it wants to do.
Meanwhile, in the US, the products being sold are highly lobbied and relies on the government moat to be protected in order for things to work. The side effect of that also means that some of the companies really don't lead to innovative outcomes in the long run, and are in positions of lucky power. This leads to poorer customer experiences, poorer technical outcomes and non competitiveness in the long run, like manufacturing. This trend needs to be reversed and the US leaders should be held responsible for doing the right thing here.
I'm well aware of TRON and its capabilities. I really think Japan can develop this and market it locally, without requiring all the bloat the current OS world comes with; It might actually turn into a speed and security advantage if they did this right.
Today, most people can vibe code their own OSes and emulators within a day or two. You're telling me an entire country can't do it? That is so defeatist.
Plus, there are some young people who are seemingly bored and have an economy not plagued by the same lobby issues as the US. They might be able to get cracking on it.
Trying to mentally parse this… I had to laugh, what does that even mean?
Japan is full of weird Japan only technologies that were adopted nowhere else.
IMHO, seems like a terminal case of NIH.
What could have been...
I think the main reasons behind BTRON failure like in the domestic market. I really don't know much about this period but here is my understanding. BTRON was never an OS, but rather a specification, a set of standards for how BTRON-compatible operating systems should behave. This is quite similar to POSIX, but the standard covered significantly more than POSIX (e.g. HMI guidelines and character encoding) and the BTRON standard came _before_ the implementations. But just like POSIX, there was no guaranteed ABI compatibility. And to make things worse, every implementation had to be rewritten from scratch, while most Unix distributions before GNU traced their code all the way back to AT&T Unix.
The other issue is that with BTRON1, the OS implementation seem to have been expected to be developed by the hardware vendor - they were not envisioned as highly portable operating systems yet.
The different OSs were supposed to be developed by OEM vendors and interated directly into their hardware (especially with BTRON1). From what I could find, only 3 vendors have signed up for BTRON: Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and OKI[1]. As far as I can tell, out of the three, only Panasonic ended up releasing BTRON-based computers. Panasonic went quite heavy on TRON and released multiple BTRON products, but Panasonic was a minor player in the home PC market in 1990[2].
Another small company that picked up BTRON was Personal Media. They released a sizable variety of BTRON-based hardware during the years and eventually started releasing it as a software package. In fact, they're still active today, rleasing it as chokanji, running inside a VM on Windows[3]. They basically took BTRONs impressive Kanji support and pivoted to an IME allowing inputting Kanji characters outside of Unicode.
The names that are missing from this story are all the big players in the PC industry in Japan in the 1990s. It's obvious why IBM Japan wasn't onboard, but NEC had its own monopoly to protect and Fujitsu and EPSON were clearly not interested[4]. CTRON, on the other hand, was picked up by NTT, which is probably the only company that mattered in Japanese telecommunications back in the early 1990s. BTRON had a window of opportunity in 1990, since Japan (or the rest of the world for that matter) did not have a dominant GUI platform yet. But in a market where the OS came with the hardware, lackluster vendor supported kinda sealed the deal.
[1] https://qiita.com/ko1nksm/items/243865903ae48c2c2c29
[2] AFAIK it was heavily dominated by NEC, with the smaller players bein Toshiba, Fujitsu and Epson. In 1990, when the first BTRON implementations were released, the dominant standard was PC-98, which was developed by NEC, with Toshiba and Epson making PC-98 clones. Even though all these computers were running x86 and usually ran on MS-DOS, they were NOT compatible with IBM PCs. This is mostly due to IBM PC not having enough RAM to display Kanji, so the which Japanese PC manufacturers in the 1980s solved with custom Kanji ROM chips. Getting Kanji support throughout the stack also meant heavily modifying MS-DOS and producing a different software stack that is tied to the custom hardware.
1990 is also the year that both DOS/V (a localized version of DOS that had built-in Kanji support) and Windows 3.0 were released, and both of them eventually lead to the death of domestic Japanese PC standards, since they could sufficiently support Kanji in software. 286 and 386 based PCs with extended memory were also powerful enough now to support Kanji in software, and DOS/V and Windows provided a standard application runtime environment for that. But this eventual standardization took time and back in 1990, PC-98 dominated the home market, while IBM managed to get some corporate market share with its PS/55 (an IBM PC variant with a custom display adapter with its own Kanji ROM).
[4] OP happily mentions NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu, but it fails to mention that they joined other TRON initiatives (ITRON, CTRON and The TRON chip) and explicitly declined to join BTRON.
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).
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.
So it's not just clickbait-y, it misleading at best if not just a lie.
The title should have been "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened although it quickly changed its mind, but a Japanese Windows PC seller used that intervention to boycott it". Or maybe just "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, here's why it failed".