the people who have spread this rumor--and unfortunately there are Japanese, who should know better, as well as foreigners engaged in disseminating disinformation about the TRON Project--overlook the fact that the TRON Project is not a short-term commercial project that has to conquer some particular market in two or three years to be judged a success. Rather it is a long-term noncommercial digital infrastructure development project, the success of which can only be judged when true computerized societies come into existence. And that won't be until well into the 21st century.
Interestingly, most of today's "success stories" in the computer field are based technologies that sat around being used only by a handful of people before they were "discovered" by entrepreneurs and put into widespread commercial use.
For example, the Internet technology that you are using to view this Web page dates back to 1969, when development began on a special network for the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. That's almost 30 years ago!! So why is it that the TRON-based technologies have to become commercial successes in only five or six years? Isn't there a double standard at work here--particularly in light of the fact that the TRON Project aims at creating the world's first total computer architecture? No, friends, the TRON Project is no failure, and in fact it will probably make some future entrepreneur(s) exceedingly rich when it becomes an axis around which technology fortunes will be made in the 21st century.
Just to stress the point, let's list below some of the famous technologies you know about and when they came or will come into widespread use after successful commercialization.
| Technology | Birth of the Technology | Beginning of Widespread Use |
| BASIC programming language | 1963 (Dartmouth College) | 1975~1977 (MS-BASIC, etc.) |
| Batch processing operating system | 1964 (IBM System/360) | 1976~1981 (CP/M, MS-DOS, etc.) |
| GUI-based operating system | 1973 (Xerox Alto) | 1984 (Apple Macintosh, etc.) |
| Multiuser, multitask operating system | 1969 (AT&T UNIX) | 1983 (various MPU-based workstations) |
| Internet | 1969 (U.S. DOD ARPANET) | 1990 (World Wide Web) |
| Object-oriented operating system | 1988 (NeXT, first commercialized use) | 1998 (Apple Rhapsody?) |
Another thing that has to be taken into consideration in debunking the "failure myth" unfriendly forces spread about the TRON Project is that the basic technologies it aims at creating have yet to be fully developed. That is to say, although ITRON-, BTRON-, and CTRON-based systems have been developed and commercialized, the technology that will link them together, MTRON, has yet to attain completion. So if one of the key building blocks for realizing the TRON Hypernetwork--in technical parlance, the Highly Functional Distributed System--is not yet in existence, what basis is there for saying the project is a failure?
In summary, the TRON Project is no failure. The only failure that those of us participating in the TRON Project know of is that of the TRON Project's critics and foes, who have tried to characterize it as a failure when in fact it has for the most part been highly successful. So remember, . . .
The TRON dream is alive and well.
The TRON Project is on a course to success.
And the TRON Architecture will eventually become the standard for network computing
That all the other standards will have to measure themselves against.