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/