Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened

91 points by lproven a day ago on lobsters | 13 comments

landon | 19 hours ago

Every time I learn about how the US Trade Representative has affected computing history I get depressed.

gcupc | a day ago

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.

@doug-moen really likes loves OpenDoc and the idea of a document-based OS.

Yogthos | a day 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.

hjvt | a day ago

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside

Talk about not valuing the goose...

ansible-rs | 22 hours ago

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son

That guy has made a lot of very bad investments over the years.

gerikson | 22 hours ago

And yet he's still rich AF.

landon | 14 hours ago

He's doing fine

conartist6 | a day ago

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.

Yogthos | a day ago

The US is a capitalist state, so the government fundamentally represents the interests of the capital owning class.

landon | 19 hours ago

It's not about laws, it's about negotiation and leverage and nipping competition at the bud. The USTR'S job is: "How can we use US market domination to ruin things that threaten it using pure economics." It isn't a legal question.

Ever wonder why damn near everybody passed dmca-esque anticircumvention laws in a bizarrely compatible and coordinated fashion circa 200x? Cause the USTR said "do this or we won't give you a reasonable trade agreement." No laws were even close to broken.

MarkMLl | 15 hours ago

Much the same as one of the facets of the current USA/Canada spat. The US federal government has strong controls that mandate that suppliers should be American corporations, but demands that Canada open up its government procurement to bids by American corporations.

[OP] lproven | a day ago

Last time I even saw a mention of this was at CCC a whole 5 years ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA