Japan's TRON OS was killed by US trade pressure, but its embedded twin thrives
Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened
In 1989, a US trade report named Japan's TRON operating system a trade barrier, effectively killing its desktop variant BTRON. The project, backed by MITI and major Japanese firms, aimed to create a national OS with a hypermedia file system and custom CPU. Yet its embedded variant ITRON quietly became one of the most deployed OSes in history, running in billions of devices.
TRON itself was never denied, but it became an OS with a blemish from America. We can't use it.