TRON

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TRON — The Realtime Operating Nucleus, was a Japanese project for creating a standard open computing platform for all tiers of computing: from embedded and industrial ("ITRON") to personal/business computers ("BTRON"). It was initiated in 1984, spearheaded by Dr Ken Sakamura at Tokyo University.

Notable for BTRON was that it had a novel ergonomic keyboard and used graphics tablets as pointing devices and for input of Kanji. Adoption of BTRON in Japan was however effectively suppressed after pressure from the USA on the Japanese government.

The only widely adopted part is ITRON, which being a realtime OS for embedded applications has been in billions of devices, including cell phones, industrial robots and automobiles. It is succeeded by the T-Kernel realtime operating system.

TRON also suffers from lack of documentation in other languages than Japanese, and from its name being used by other things.

TRON keyboards

PMC TK1

Personal Media Corporation TK1

External links:

• Xahl Lee—TRON Keyboard

PMC µTron

Main article: µTRON

The µTron (micro-Tron) from Personal Media Corporation. Unlike other TRON keyboards, it has symmetric stagger and is fully split.

Clone keyboards

SkeleTron ST-2000

External link:

• Xah Lee—SkeleTron

TL Split16

16 mm key pitch. Fully split.

• TL Split Keyboard 16mm Rev1紹介 on Github
• Yusha Kobo shop—【Consignment】TL Split Keyboard 16mm Rev1

Legacy

• The Esrille also has support for TRON's input system.

Papers

Sadao Tachibana, Ken Sakamura (1987): An Implementation of the TRON Keyboard. In: Sakamura K. (eds) TRON Project 1987 Open-Architecture Computer Systems. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-68069-7_12

External links

• TRON Web
• TRON Project on Wikipedia
• BTRON on Wikipedia.