Thursday, November 22, 2007

Operating System News

The Most Popular Operating System in the World

What is the world's most widely used operating system? It's not Windows, Unix or Linux, but ITRON, a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems. ITRON runs on mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and countless other electronic devices.
ITRON emerged as an ambitious Japanese initiative known as The Real-time Operating system Nucleus (TRON). Launched in 1984, TRON was designed to replace disparate computer systems with a unified, open architecture for a "total computer environment."
Its ultimate goal was to create "highly functionally distributed systems" in which all system components are connected to a real-time network . Professor Ken Sakamura, spiritual father of TRON, conceived the project as a social infrastructure akin to the electrical power grid or water supply system.
Now, the T-Engine Forum, an offshoot of the TRON project with more than 250 member companies, has been working to create a standardized development environment for embedded applications based on ITRON. Vendors of proprietary solutions are worried -- or at least should be.
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ITRON Is First
ITRON, the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture, answered a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which traditionally have written their own software for embedded systems, a time-consuming and cumbersome process that often results in a plethora of different and incompatible systems.
The ITRON specification is a standard real-time OS kernel that can be tailored to any embedded system. ITRON already has been ported to a wide range of microprocessor architectures and has quickly become Japan's de facto standard for embedded systems. Today, the specification is used in an estimated 3 billion microprocessors.
ITRON has been followed by several other specifications -- among them Business TRON (BTRON), a multilingual, ubiquitous computing environment with a programmable GUI, and Communications and Central TRON (CTRON), a real-time, multitasking operating system akin to Unix.
Japanese telecom giant NTT has embraced CTRON and made it the de facto standard in Japan's telecom industry.

Source: http://www.linuxinsider.com/

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