As of September 2012, Personal Media Corporation is marketing two BTRON-specification products to the general public in Japan.
One is the 32-bit BTRON3-specification B-right/V R4.5 operating system with bundled applications and a large collection of freeware. It is essentially the same as B-right/V R4, but instead of running in its own partition, it runs in emulation on top of IBM-PC/AT compatibles using VMware Player. This is marketed as Cho Kanji V in Japan and is mainly aimed at Japanese speakers, but both English and Esperanto language kits are available for foreign users.
The other BTRON-specification product on the market is the 32-bit BTRON3-specification PMC T-Shell middleware set, which runs on top of a wide selection of T-Engine development boards and appliances that are equipped with different MPUs. A big difference between Cho Kanji V and PMC T-Shell is that the former is aimed at ordinary end users, while the latter is aimed at embedded system developers. Accordingly, PMC T-Shell is equipped with some, but not all, of the applications bundled with Cho Kanji V.
Another difference between Cho Kanji V and PMC T-Shell lies in the microkernel on top of which they run. In contrast to B-right/V, which uses an ITRON-based microkernel, the T-Engine boards and appliances use a new microkernel called "T-Kernel." For the differences between the two kernels, please look here.
The chart below lists all the versions of BTRON-specification operating systems that have been put on sale to the general public as of September 2012. Accordingly, it does not include Matsushita Communication Industrial Co., Ltd.'s "PanaCAL ET," which was only put on sale to educational institutions in 1991. The PanaCAL ET used the BTRON-specification "ET Master" operating system on top of Panacom M530 hardware.
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| 1990 | 2B (so-called "pure BTRON" running on Gmicro series MPUs) | ||||
| 1991 | 1B/Note (Matsushita laptop; not IBM-PC/AT compatible) | ||||
| 1994 | 1B/V1 (IBM-PC/AT compatibles) | ||||
| 1995 | 1B/V2 (IBM-PC/AT compatibles) | ||||
| 1996 | 1B/V3 (IBM-PC/AT compatibles) | ||||
| 1997 | B-right (µBTRON for BrainPad TiPO PDA) | ||||
| 1998 | B-right/V (multilingual system based on a single character plane) | ||||
| 1999 | B-right/V R2 (Cho Kanji with true BTRON multilingual system) | ||||
| 2000 | B-right/V R2.5 (Cho Kanji 2 with JIS levels 3 and 4) | ||||
| 2001 | B-right/V R3 (Cho Kanji 3 with GT Typeface Font) | ||||
| 2001 | B-right/V R4 (Cho Kanji 4 capable of handling large HDDs) | ||||
| 2002 | _ |
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| 2003 | PMC T-Shell (B-right/V middleware running on T-Kernel) | ||||
| 2006 | B-right/V R4.5 (Cho Kanji V that runs on top of MS Windows using VMware Player) |
B-right/V is a registered trademark of Personal Media Corporation.
