Personal Media Corporation announced on March 15 that it intends to put on sale on Thursday, April 12, a new software application that will allow IBM-PC/AT-compatible personal computers equipped with the B-right/V R3 operating system--marketed in Japan as Cho Kanji 3--to be employed as Web content servers. The company said it will offer the new application, which is called "Cho Kanji 3 Uebu saaba," directly to interested parties at a price of 50,000 yen (consumption tax not included). This sales policy and pricing indicates that the Personal Media is aiming the software application at institutional users rather than individual users.
Cho Kanji 3 Uebu saaba represents the merger of the BTRON filing system--a hypertext filing system called the "real object virtual object model" in TRON parlance--with the hypertext filing system of the World Wide Web (WWW). This merger was achieved through the creation of a mechanism that converts the virtual objects (links) of the BTRON filing system into the anchor links of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the programming language used for creating Web pages. As a result, it is not necessary for BTRON users to learn how to program in HTML in order to prepare content for display on the WWW. Text and graphics data created with standard BTRON operations can be made available without any modifications by the user.
Another important feature of Cho Kanji 3 Uebu saaba is that it has a mechanism for converting characters from the massive BTRON character set that are not available in the viewer's system into graphic images before transmission. This allows content viewers using Netscape Corporation's Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Corporation's Internet Explorer on non-BTRON personal computers to access textual data written with any of the 170,000 characters included in the BTRON3-specification operating system. (Click here for an example of Cho Kanji 3 data being viewed through Internet Explorer running on a MS Windows-based system.) The product specification for Cho Kanji 3 Uebu Saaba is as follows:
| Compatible OS |
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| Items that Can Be Set on the Server Side |
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| Objects for Conversion and Transmission |
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| Conversion Method for Characters Outside the Viewer's Character Code Range |
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| Control Codes and Fusen that Can Be Converted into HTML |
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| Embedded Figure and Figure Real Object Conversion Method |
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| Virtual Object Conversion Method |
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| Graphic Data Format Generated |
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For further information about this product and/or to place an order, please contact Personal Media's Sales Department. The contact information is as follows:
The TRON Association and Personal Media Corporation held a "Multi-Kanji Multi-Character OS Practical Use Seminar" on March 30 in Building A of Ochanomizu Square in the Kanda district of Tokyo. The seminar, which was held to help interested parties install the B-right/V R3 operating system in their laptop computers and learn the basic operations, took place in a rented room that had seating for 63 persons--and most of the seats were filled before the program began. Even more surprising was the fact that many of the people who attended the lecture were Japanese literature specialists who had heard of the outstanding kanji (Chinese character) processing capabilities of the operating system.
The seminar program ran from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. During the first two hours in the morning, participants installed B-right/V R3 in their laptops and then listened to a description of the basic operation methods, which was presented by Mr. Hiroyuki Oshima of Personal Media Corporation. The first two hours of the afternoon part of the program were taken up by presentations from professors Ken Sakamura and Noboru Koshizuka of the University of Tokyo, who spoke on multilingual processing and its uses in universities. The program was concluded with short presentations on the Character Search utility, putting a multilingual/multi-character operating system to practical use; and inputting other world scripts.
Prof. Sakamura wowed the audience with samples of the character archiving projects that are under way at the University of Tokyo using the BTRON3-specification operating system. He said a project to digitize the famous K'ang Hsi dictionary, an unabridged Chinese character dictionary that was compiled in China in the 18th century, has almost been completed, and that the dictionary will be put on sale on sale at a modest price in May. Prof. Koshizuka, on the other hand, described attempts to put the BTRON3-specification operating system to practical use in the Faculty of Letters, where he has been assigned. He said one of the first requests he received was to make up multilingual name lists and databases.
TRON Web has uncovered a new source for downloading BTRON freeware from the World Wide Web. Vector Inc., which also makes available shareware on line for other operating systems, such as MS Windows and Macintosh, has dedicated a page to BTRON freeware applications and data collections. There are currently 50 items for the BTRON-specification operating system that can be downloaded from the following link.
http://www.vector.co.jp/vpack/filearea/other/tron/index.html
