GoKawiilThe B-right/V R2 Operating System
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
The BTRON Computing Model
Although it may not seem like it, what can broadly be termed "personal computing devices" are based on only three conceptual models. In order of their historical appearance, they are: the "stand alone computer model," which first came into being as the batch processing mainframe with a command line interpreter; the "networked stand alone computer model," which saw its first incarnation as the object-oriented workstation with a graphical user interface (GUI); and the "network interface computer model," a terminal-like computer for single users in an environment where all computers are linked together. The golden age of the first conceptual model has long passed, and the current age is a transitional period in which we are moving from the second conceptual model to the third.
What may be surprising to many is that the third conceptual model was first conceived not in the U.S., which has rightly earned the distinction of the "world's systems house," but rather in Japan, which has historically been viewed as a country that creates great hardware but is poor at software--particularly systems software. However, in the mid 1980s, long before computing platforms based on either the IBM-PC or Macintosh operating systems were considered for use as interfaces to a "network of networks" called the Internet, the TRON Project began work on the BTRON-specification operating system, which was conceived as a real-time human-machine interface to a "hypernetwork in which all computers and computerized devices throughout human society would be interconnected."
The network interface computer differs from the standard personal computers of today mainly in terms of size. Network interface computers have very small operating systems, and hence they require very little in the way of hardware resources to run. This allows them to be built at very low cost, which in turn allows organizations that employ them to save considerable amounts of money on management information systems. But all network interface computers are not based on the same design precepts.
One computing model for the network interface computer, the "network computer" proposed in the late 1990s in the U.S., was conceived of as a machine that would operate inside a company's local area network (LAN). Since it would always be used in conjunction with a company-owned server, programs and data could be stored there and downloaded as necessary. In fact, Sun Microsystems Inc., one of the companies that is strongly pushing for the adoption of network computers in the U.S., is planning to take this paradigm and apply it to the Internet. The company plans to offer its freeware StarOffice productivity suite via StarPortal, a Web site from which users can download data and applications and do data processing inside their browsers. People signing up for this service will only need a browser and an Internet connection. However, there is a problem with this computing model in that current browsers are huge applications, and they run on even larger operating systems, so the cost savings will mainly be limited to software. (For a critique of Sun's efforts with StarOffice, click here.)
That's where the BTRON-specification operating system is different. BTRON lies between today's gargantuan personal computer operating systems--which have become as large as mainframe computer operating systems and continue to get bigger with each new upgrade!--and the stripped down operating systems of LAN-based network computers. BTRON is compact, which is why basically the same BTRON3-specification source code can be used in both PDAs and IBM-PC/AT compatibles, and yet it is extremely powerful. The design specification calls for word processor and graphics editor functions as standard equipment, but the commercial implementation by Personal Media Corporation called B-right/V has, in addition, a spreadsheet program, a scripting language, an e-mailer, a card database program, a Web browser, PC communications software, plus various utilities, such as file converters--and that's not even to mention a World Wide Web-like hypertext filing system at the system level.
As a result, a BTRON-specification computer requires no Internet or LAN connection to do data processing, but the hardware required to run the latest BTRON implementation, B-right/V R2, is minimal: an Intel 486DX microprocessor-based PC, 16 megabytes of main memory, and a few hundred megabytes of hard disk space. In other words, a BTRON-based system can be manufactured almost as cheaply as a network computer, although it has all the functionality of a standard computer. And if that sounds too good to be true, it gets better. B-right/V R2 has for the first time in the history of personal computing implemented a true multilingual computing environment that allows users to employ up to approximately 130,000 characters in their documents. The majority of these characters are kanji (Chinese characters), which for the first time allow the Japanese people to write any word in their language--and they come in outline fonts to boot!
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