The efforts to establish Tron as the Japanese national operating system are proceeding on schedule, and Mitsubishi Electric Corp has had enthusiastic enough response to samples of its low-end G-Micro-100 32-bit microprocessor from manufacturers of factory automation equipment to put the part into volume production.G-Micro is a family of microprocessors optimised for Tron, which is being jointly designed by Mitsubishi with Fujitsu Ltd and Hitachi Ltd. The first version of the part will be clocked at 20MHz and integrates a conservative 330,000 transistors; it is rated at 10 MIPS and is initially being made at a rate of 5,000 a month. Meantime Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has a B-Tron personal computer aimed at schools, for delivery in July, and plans a word processor using the Mitsubishi chip. B-Tron is the business and educational version of the operating system; I-Tron is for factory applications and C-Tron for communications.Although Tron will have an uphill struggle making any headway in international markets any time soon, it is likely to become established by stealth as Japanese firms start to export it in sealed-box applications like robotic control systems, consumer electronic products and home control and management systems – and the effort being devoted to writing software for Tron in Japan will tend to make it cheaper for competitors in other countries to buy in that code than write it for other operating systems.
