Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened
44 points by lproven
44 points by lproven
The article says something quite different from that the headline implies.
It sounds like US law may have been a tool used, but not the cause. The cause was greed for US money.
The US is a capitalist state, so the government fundamentally represents the interests of the capital owning class.
The design of applications in this reminds me a lot of OpenDoc, the ill-fated attempt by Apple and IBM to create a standard for component-structured desktop applications. TRON goes a lot further than OpenDoc, which was for the application level only and, for example, sat on top of a normal filesystem.
Last time I even saw a mention of this was at CCC a whole 5 years ago...
It was a fascinating dive, and the idea of making a document oriented OS rather than application oriented one would’ve been so much better. The most frustrating part about modern computing is that data is tied to specific apps. But if things were designed around data from the ground up, we could’ve had far better file standards. Business logic could’ve been decoupled from presentation as well, and you could create interfaces on the fly to represent a specific workflow you want. Basically a similar idea to the way shell scripting works but for the desktop.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside
Talk about not valuing the goose...