TRON was an ambitious project to say the least, and after a good start, it suddenly came to a screeching halt.
  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    8 hours

    Turkey tried to push Pardus (a debian based distro developed in Turkey) in its earliest days as a national OS alternative that on a proposed law would be required to be listed as an option you can choose when buyjng your computer, then Bill Gates stepped in to have talks with the government and that law idea stopped.

    Currently they’re on another push by having it be taught on computer lessons and forcing it on smart boards, but the effects it could’ve gotten back then would be crazy.

  • jama211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23 hours

    I doubt it would’ve won anyway. There were loads of OS’s at that time, most not having the issue of the US government intervening, and none of them won either.

    • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
      12 hours

      Had the japenese not been spooked by the sugestion it waa a threat(which was cleared up as not being one) it totally could have been adopted nationwide, as it was ready to deploy to their schools.

      And today we have BSD as the basis of Apples OS.

      Microsoft has gone from say 85% market share down to the 60s now I think.

      Maybe we will see a day MS loses to Linux since that hit 10% use last month, and has over 15% use in India.

      MS certainly is not helping themselves win lately.

  • lemmelemmy@feddit.orgEnglish
    18 hours

    I remember seeing it somewhere ages ago, might not be correct.

    It was saying the reason why Microsoft was dominant on OS market right now because it was Sony didn’t wanted to invest in operating systems back then.

  • GolfFoxtrotLima@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2 days

    It’s time for other countries to create their own operating systems again

    Make other countries create other operating systems again

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2 days

      One of the biggest lie to keep the current system in place.

      Private corporations parasite themselves into R&D paid for by the government and act like they invented the fire again.

      The Internet is built on FOSS and got captured to be sold back to us.

      Capitalism breeds innovation just like people leave their partner when they finally have enough to be abused.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.orgEnglish
      2 days

      Competition breeds innovation. Commercial pressure can be one source of such competition, but isn’t the only one.

      Capitalism abhors competition. It breeds innovation only if it serves to eliminate competition.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1 day

        Absolutely correct, Capitalism will incentivize innovation only as long as it’s profitable to do so. Once a company becomes a dominant player in their industry, innovation actually becomes largely unprofitable.

        We can see this play out all the time, this is why industry giants almost never try to outcompete smaller start ups by innovating their products and services, instead, they either crush them out of the market via a bunch of different methods. Or they just buy them out, kill off their IP, or if it’s way better, they just brand it as their own, and usually fire most of the old staff.

        In a Capitalist system, this actually creates a whole new incentive structure where start ups will try to grow as fast as possible with the sole intention of getting bought out by an industry titan, making the founders of the start up filthy rich.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      lemmings blaming everything on capitalism

      also lemmings: scrolling on their apple iphone that also had a gui decades ahead of its time in the 80s

      • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caEnglish
        24 hours

        I don’t think I’ve ever seen a profile with a comment history this bad. Ever stop to ask yourself why you have such unpopular opinions?

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      No this was capitalism in action. Capitalism bred the innovation in TRON.

      Governments getting involved and putting their thumb on the scales to control the economy is the opposite of capitalism.

        • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 days

          Just like the dumbasses say “the Soviet Union wasn’t REAL communism”?

          Except I’m correct. A government implementing protectionist policies to control economic sectors is not capitalist.

          • Terrorphin@thelemmy.clubEnglish
            2 days

            Yes it is - capitalism demands that in fact. You’re thinking of free-markets. Capitalism inevitably destroys free markets.

            • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 days

              Yes it is - capitalism demands that in fact. You’re thinking of free-markets. Capitalism inevitably destroys free markets.

              Lets see if we can agree on some definitions.

              What you’re describing as “free-markets” I know as laissez-faire capitalism. This definition came from, unsurprisingly, the French in the 18th century and was used heavily by Adam Smith in the book The Wealth of Nations. I think we all agree there are very few, if any, true large scale laissez-faire capitalism in operation today.

              What have in most places is regulated capitalism where there are government rules that change the outcome to a different outcome (sometimes better/sometimes worse) that would have occurred under laissez-faire capitalism.

              Are we in agreement with these definitions or do we still have discussion needed to arrive at the same place?

              • Terrorphin@thelemmy.clubEnglish
                2 days

                OK sure - if we’re being strict and academic about this - perhaps it would be more accurate for me to say that capitalism in the pure platonic sense doesn’t really exist, and tends always towards crony or state capitalism where the power of the state is used to funnel money and power towards the holders of capital rather than to provide a free and fair playing field for economic actors.

                • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2 days

                  perhaps it would be more accurate for me to say that capitalism in the pure platonic sense doesn’t really exist,

                  I agree with this without any reservations.

                  and tends always towards crony or state capitalism where the power of the state is used to funnel money and power towards the holders of capital rather than to provide a free and fair playing field for economic actors.

                  I take exception with “always”. In the USA for example, there have been many notable exceptions where state capitalism implemented protections from abuses that pure laissez-faire capitalism would have allowed. The National Labor Relations Act was a state action that allowed for collective bargaining of workers. More recently the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau acted as an agent against uncheck capitalist forcing a fair playing field.

                  I’d probably agree if you changed your word to “frequently” though.

          • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 days

            Except I never said you were factually incorrect, since that seems to be the most important thing for you to get out of this exchange.

          • SirActionSack@aussie.zoneEnglish
            2 days

            Government tipping the scales to help their capitalist mates seems to be exactly how capitalism works.

      • Triasha@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        Government getting involved and putting their thumb on the economy is as capitalist as it gets.

        South Sea Trading bubble, East India Company, Lake Eyrie Canal, trans continental railroad. Teapot Dome.

        The government has ALLWAYS had its thumb on the scale for big business interests and if you think that’s not true I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you.

        Right next to some beachfront property in Arizona.

        • Doom@discuss.onlineEnglish
          1 day

          I don’t understand your comment.

          You’re listing things and going “BAD” so Capitalism is bad.

          A trading bubble is really just economics. Can’t really say Capitalism causes that. The East India Trading Company is mercantilism which as evil as that specific company was the idea of trading goods from one country to another is like the core of our entire economic trade system today. Teapot Dome was flagrant corruption which happens in any economic system, the Canal and the railroad are more examples of labor exploitation which you can easily argue was less bad than the labor exploitation that came before it and led to better labor laws in the country.

          It’s like you’re pointing at a gun and saying “FIRE MADE GUN, FIRE BAD!” because guns kill people. It’s pretty caveman.

          • Triasha@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 day

            I mean, capitalist do the same thing with socialism every day. It takes a lot of propaganda to get people to believe that caring for your neighbors = bad.

            • Doom@discuss.onlineEnglish
              1 day

              As someone who supports socialist movements I 100% agree. But I really think the big problem in the world right now is the misunderstanding of capital basically. People think capital or money or anything that involves government is capitalism? Or something? I don’t really understand.

              But just because people we might call capitalists pearl clutch about socialism doesn’t give someone the space to do the same back, or really just lie/be ignorant. We can definitely discuss the flaws of economic systems or the system we live under and some solutions. But stamping “CAPITALISM BAD” or “SOCIALISM BAD” literally gets us nowhere.

              • Triasha@lemmy.worldEnglish
                20 hours

                Hard dissagree, the average American reads at a 5th grade level.

                If you want to have a higher level coveraation, sure, but for general messaging: CAPITALISM BAD is the only thing that will get through.

      • gandalf_der_13te@feddit.orgEnglish
        2 days

        No this was capitalism in action. Capitalism bred the innovation in TRON.

        Governments getting involved and putting their thumb on the scales to control the economy is the opposite of capitalism.

        did you read the article? TRON was heavily backed by the japanese government.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    That tracks.

    The more I learn about American history the more frustrated I become with our species in general. Our country could be so much more livable now, but for a handful of vulgarly wealthy people who only ever cared about number going up at any cost.

    And to make it worse I’m reading a biography of John D. Rockefeller, so I’m about to hate our species just a tiny bit more.

    • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      All of our lives could be so much better. We should stop making dystopian futuristic movies, and start making hopeful ones that help people imagine how much BETTER things could be.

        • ouRKaoS@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2 days

          You can just vibe-direct it with AI for the irony! And the lulz!

          (/s, please no one do this 😐)

      • architect@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        2 days

        We aren’t making any moves. We sit here and let them do it. They’re only human we can stop them

        • HuudaHarkiten@piefed.socialEnglish
          16 hours

          I would.

          One reason why I dont really watch sci-fi anymore is because its all just miserable, world ending, world dying, world dead, explosions, aliens, aliens exploding. Boring.

          That Hail Mary movie was okay-ish. At least it had people, and that thing, doing helpful and constructive stuff.

  • OctopusNemeses@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    And once upon a time there were more than three PC graphics card makers. The paranoid schizo US really fucked up scientific and technological progress.

    • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      They rose to the top because they were the only country that could still build things after the rest of the world got flattened in World War II. Then the rest of the world rebuilt itself so the only asset the US had left was economic inertia. They then proceeded to spend decades doing everything they could to increase the value of that inertia by using their influence to encourage policies that resulted the rich getting richer.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        And when the Eastern Bloc dissolved, government owned corporations got sold off to western ones, for pennies, all to be shut down in a few weeks. If not, usually they got boycotted, because the kids finally could buy western brands, which made you look cool among your peers.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          1 day

          Eastern Europe sold its stuff away mainly because of local corruption. Local factories would get sold as scrap by one wise guy and a couple of his friends in the budding government fresh after a revolution because they could make a quick buck and set themselves up for more similar opportunities. Also “scrap” claim would take a long time to be investigated and never amount to anything.

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2 days

        And now it’s over, well it might take a decade or so but Europe is rebuilt and the USA is shitting its pants(not because they’re scared, just because it seems).

    • setsubyou@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      There also were more than two PC platforms (and we barely have two now; Apple was pretty close to going away too). I miss being the Atari ST guy in a circle of people who all had different types of computers. It didn’t last very long but it was way more fun.

    • jimmy90@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 day

      have you heard of Macintosh? you’ve heard of Mac’s right.

      little company called Apple? lol sheeeesh

  • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
    2 days

    Something similar happened to Slovene Iskra Triglav computer which was quite advanced for the time (capable of running three different CPUs) but then caught in between US-Soviet cold war/embargo while trying to sell them to Soviet Union.

    • brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish
      2 days

      Three CPUs with different architectures on one device sounds crazy. That’s amazing.

      • greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish
        2 days

        PS3 comes to mind

        Though in embedded, thats fairly normal.

        I’ve got a $1 linux embedded SoC that has a 64 bit riscv core, a 32 bit riscv core for running realtime stuff and a low power embedded 6502 on it too because why not.

          • greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish
            2 days

            Its actually not seperate cores, they’re RISCV or ARM, based on a switch. MilkV does that too with one of its chips. They’re mostly the same architecturally, theres something like 10% that gets enabled/disabled with each ISA selection.

            • Don't forget to stay hydrated.🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2 days

              But you can still run both at once. RP2350 datasheet

              From section 3.9 Arm/RISC-V architecture switching:

              There are two processor sockets on RP2350, referred to as core 0 and core 1 throughout this document. Each socket can be occupied either by a Cortex-M33 processor (implementing the Armv8-M Main architecture, plus extensions) or by a Hazard3 processor (implementing the RV32IMAC architecture, plus extensions).

              From section 3.9.2. Mixed architecture combinations:

              The ARCHSEL register has one bit for each processor socket, so it is possible to request mixed combinations of Arm and RISC-V processors: either Arm core 0 and RISC-V core 1, or RISC-V core 0 and Arm core 1.

              Practical applications for this are limited, since this requires two separate program images. The two cores interoperate normally, including shared exclusives via the global monitor: a shared variable can be safely, concurrently accessed by an Arm processor performing ldrex, strex instructions and a RISC-V processor performing amoadd.w instructions, for example

        • Natanael@infosec.pubEnglish
          23 hours

          Original Nintendo DS had two different ARM CPUs for DS games and the same CPU the GBA had for direct compatibility.

          • missingno@fedia.io
            2 days

            The second CPU is the GBA CPU, but at twice the clockspeed (which can then downclock for GBA games). You’re double-counting it and making it sound like the system had three.

            The 3DS is the real funny one, adding its own new CPU alongside both the DS and GBA CPUs. So that’s actually three.

            • Natanael@infosec.pubEnglish
              1 day

              I was probably thinking of the z80 then but that didn’t get included

        • anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2 days

          OSX (now MacOS) was built and running on PowerPC and Intel for years before Intel Macs were released. I assume the same was true before they released the Apple silicon chips.

          • greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish
            2 days

            Yeah but they weren’t running both in the same device at the same time.

            PPC -> Intel they just recompiled their OS and fixed it up for the x86 platform, then the same for Intel -> ARM

            They did not have a laptop with an x86 processor and a PPC at the same time… though there are some hillariously bespoke accellerator cards from back in the day to do all sorts of strange things.

            That said, laptops are full of microcontrollers with firmware, lots of those will be atmega, st32, 6502 and the like. Things like a WLAN or WAN card will be a little ARM soc of some flavour.

            So it really depends on where you draw the line. If its executing the main workload, I’d say thats the CPU, everything else is a microcontroller enabling it to do that

    • hayvan@piefed.worldEnglish
      2 days

      Soviets did a lot to harm Eastern Block tech. Bulgarian Pravetz was a clone of Apple ][. Nothing impressive but cheap, functional, domestically produced. Can’t really be exported towards west due to blatant IP violations, but the production capabilities were good enough to produce and export hard drives.

      Except the trade deal with Britain was blocked by Soviets because it was seen as a security threat, and an industry died in its infancy.

      • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyzEnglish
        2 days

        There’s another future where Yugoslavia is the birthplace of a free software movement, and homebuilt PCs lower the barrier of entry to anybody with some time on their hands, with software distributed by radio and powerline until the advent of internet.

        • hayvan@piefed.worldEnglish
          2 days

          Ah yes, I recently learned about Galaksija, it’s fascinating!

      • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
        2 days

        Iskra Delta was a Slovene (republic) company, even within Yugoslavia. But if you nitpick, then technically it would be Yugoslavia as country.

      • darklamer@feddit.orgEnglish
        2 days

        The Socialist Republic of Slovenia was one of the six federal republics forming the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, if you want to be technical about it.

    • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      2 days

      that computer sounds awesome, imagine something like this existed today(like a computer with a RISC-V,Arm64 and X86-64 CPU) .

    • SuperFola@programming.devEnglish
      2 days

      I’d say US/USians, as America is more than just the US. America is composed of more countries like Canada, Mexico, Brazil…

      You can downvote me all you want, it doesn’t change anything.

              • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipEnglish
                2 days

                People who are adamant about “America is too confusing” are very rarely in agreement with “Afro-Eurasia”, such that if someone says “Colombians are American”, they’re unlikely to say “French people are African” or even “Afro-Eurasian”.

                It’s a cultural/language thing, rather than an objective one. There’s no reason that (most) English speakers who don’t call Peruvians “Americans” are any more incorrect than Peruvians who don’t say “Spanish people are Africans” are wrong. But it’s become a whole thing on the internet to say that “USians are dumb and wrong” for not having the same language concepts as other cultures. There are just different numbers of continents taught in different cultures.

                But as a tourist, does anyone from outside the US say “I’m American” when they’re asked where they’re from? Canadians at least sure as fuck would never say that.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent?useskin=vector#Number

                • kestrel7_7@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  23 hours

                  I read a biography of a Brazilian guy who lived in France during the late 19th century/early 20th century. Everyone in Europe called him an American, and he referred to himself an American when he was contrasting Brazil and France. At one point he went off about how hopeful he was about new plane tech coming out, because it would help “unite Americans across our various countries.” However, I think it’s fallen out of fashion to talk this way in recent years, partially because of USA supremacy, which is I think why people are salty about it.

                • jif@piefed.caEnglish
                  2 days

                  Nobody is saying it’s too confusing. They’re saying “stop claiming that word for yourself”.

                  Your examples are incorrect. The equivalent would be if France was called The United States of Europe, and used the word Europeans to refer exclusively to themselves.

                  Then, naturally, Germans would stop using the word European to refer to themselves because others would think they were referring to France (The United States of Europe in this example).

        • SuperFola@programming.devEnglish
          2 days

          America is not just North America you know. It’s a whole ass continent. America isn’t a country, the US is. So when you say America when you actually talk about only the US, it’s as is you were talking about Mexico, Canada, Brazil… as well as the US. Which is… dumb? False? Erroneous?

          • the_fuckler@nord.pubEnglish
            2 days

            Literally a hate crime 💀 good looking making sure nobody got confused

      • jif@piefed.caEnglish
        2 days

        No idea why you’re getting downvoted for this very valid point.

        • nyctre@piefed.socialEnglish
          24 hours

          Because it’s pedantry. Check every dictionary for america or american. Or just type “america” on whatever search engine. First thing is always the US or its citizens. If anyone ever means to refer to the continent they usually say north/south America or “the Americas”.

          Go to any country other than the US and ask a local “Are you american?”. They’re all gonna say the same thing. “No, I’m Mexican/Canadian/Chilean/etc.”

          Whenever a word has multiple meanings, you’re supposed to use context to figure out which one is being used. Well, the article title mentions the US government. It’s also a very common phrase with a well established meaning. Check out Green day’s american idiot, for example.

          Really doesn’t take a genius to understand what op meant.

  • chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    replaced the tree-structured directory hierarchy with an arbitrary directed graph.

    TBH that sounds like a total nightmare

    • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2 days

      Yeah this OS would suck as soon as the 00s hit with the global Internet. This OS seems completely incompatible with how the world actually works and would probably collapse under its own design by the year 2010. A file is an arbitrary string of bytes. Removing the ability for the user to handle them like this is so obtuse. The reason why we can poke modern OSes the way we can is to prevent requiring a man-year of work every time we need a major new feature.

      The idea was that every layer, from silicon to user interface, would be designed together, with no compatibility debt to existing platforms.

      …which makes compatability debt between it and literally everything else.

      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2 days

        A file is an arbitrary string of bytes. Removing the ability for the user to handle them like this is so obtuse.

        Per the article:

        According to the BTRON3 specification, the first two halfwords of an application ID are the data type it applies to, and only the third distinguishes rival handlers for the same type. When a document contained writing, a table, and a figure, opening those parts made the system launch each one’s registered handler to draw its own content inside the parent document’s window. If no handler exists, or the handler fails to draw, the system strikes a diagonal line through the region where the content should have been.

        That’s a window manager with application/file associations, with the ‘window’ that the application draws to being embedded within a hypertext document. So, you’d be able to attach arbitrary hypertext to a file and when you open it the window manager presents that information along with the application window. That’s not any less flexible or more limited than any other desktop OS.

        EDIT: now, it sounds like you could embed multiple ‘windows’ within the same document, and maybe do something with transclusion, but I haven’t read enough about how BTRON worked to say much about that. Still, that doesn’t fundamentally change what I wrote above.

        • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2 days

          That sounds like hell. The .DS_store problem but 100 times worse.

          • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            2 days

            Every single mainstream operating system has metadata and index stores associated with its files and applications.

            Linux has locatedb and .desktop files, and many other files that determine how content is presented to you in a desktop environment.

            Windows has NTFS alternate data streams, the registry, multiple appdata folders, and a bunch of other kludges.

    • NotSafeForWorld@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 days

      I dunno, I kinda fw it. Like having a tag-based system for grouping files instead of nested folders does give me less anxiety in organizing everything, and it lessens the bloat due to duplicates

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      So you’re saying the US saved the world from Japan for a second time?

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    I’d encourage everyone to read the article. It paints a far more nuanced picture than the headline suggests.

    • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyzEnglish
      2 days

      Nuanced yes, but it largely being driven by a Japanese guy who wanted to sell US software and US companies who didn’t want to compete by actually selling compatible hardware is no less damning.

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        Yeah. That guys “nuance” comment made me read the article, and I’m glad I did, but the end result was my expectation going in; the profit motive of capitalism killed a FOSS OS that could have nullified Americas tech dominance before it even started.

        There’s no way to know how it would’ve played out, but I could see Bill Gates’ connected family greasing the wheels of geopolitics to scare the Japanese out of implementing it, or being the catalyst promoting exclusive US proprietary tech rights to Japanese capitalists, or the CIA/NSA arguing that a Japanese controlled FOSS OS would make it harder for them to influence tech standards. Basically, like most things I’ve learned about history, it’s likely that morally and ethically bankrupt, sociopathic, criminals had their hands balls deep in the clusterfuck of a horror show, in many more ways than one.

        • Wolf314159@startrek.websiteEnglish
          2 days

          According to the article it was royalty free and published open standards, but they do not make any claim to this being an FOSS system.

          • jollyrogue@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2 days

            Per Wikipedia…

            TRON does not specify the source code for the kernel, but instead is a “set of interfaces and design guidelines” for creating the kernel. This allows different companies to create their own versions of TRON, based on the specifications, which can be suited for different microprocessors.

            It’s not even a software project as we know it. It’s a specification like POSIX, and presumably, anything implementing the spec can be certified if it passes a test suite, like UNIX.

      • deegeese@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2 days

        It would have been a completely rigged game for a US company to try and sell and TRON products in the Japanese market.

        This is exactly why it was protectionism and could have caught trade sanctions had it been more widely adopted.

    • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
      2 days

      It gives more details, but it doesn’t particularly make the US not look like a bunch of dickholes whose definition of “free market” changes to shape whatever suits them from one moment to the next.

  • xylogx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    Is it available on the internet archive or a computer museum site to try out the UI?