Chinese OS and software ecosystem
- Thread starter Jiang ZeminFanboy
- Start date
Thats weird, maybe they are trying to consolidate the game industry under the Chinese big tech brands. Or just some old ass Chinese boomer is still head of that department.
I think they want to change the rules and until that is done they decided to basically stop working lol
More official communication from these agencies would be helpful
I never realized how much Japan had its own PC ecosystem in until the mid-1990s. The NEC PC-98 was not the best hardware platform but it was the most popular due to the large number of developers who were making games for it. This shows the importance of software and not just software. Even video games. Ideally, people want both good hardware and good software.
What killed the PC-98 was Windows 95.
In the 1980s and 1990s the Japanese were really in a great position in terms of electronics. Not only did they have their own computer systems, but they dominated memory manufacture, semiconductor manufacture in general, and photolithography. However this period was really brief.
The Japanese had all sorts of personal computer architectures. Because of the Japanese character set a lot of western software wouldn't even work on a market like that back then. The big deal with Windows 95 is that it came with Unicode text support in UCS-2 format. It also had support for Japanese fonts.
Besides the NEC PC-98 they also had architectures like the Fujitsu FM Towns and the Sharp X68000. Those had more advanced multimedia capabilities than most PCs in the day and were viable desktop game platforms. From my point of view one of the problems they had was even when these desktop PCs used CPU chips manufactured in Japan they were typically licensed copies of US chip designs. The FM Towns used Intel 386 and later processors. The Sharp X68000 used the Motorola 68000 built under license at Hitachi. Later they did not even get or bother with a license and just bought processors from Motorola outright.
There was a Japanese Intel CPU clone, the NEC V20, which used a Japanese CPU design. NEC got sued by Intel so they had to pay them license fees and the fastest X86 compatible processor they made had about the speed of a 286 but used a lot less power. The later NEC V60 and later chips were not Intel compatible. Hitachi also designed and built the SH-4 RISC CPU which was used in games consoles.
Like you said the PC desktop market with custom Japanese architectures basically collapsed once Windows 95 came out. Japanese manufacturers simply couldn't compete with the economies of scale of chips and computers which could be sold worldwide vs their Japanese specific hardware. In the game console market, companies like Nintendo and Sony won out, and they gradually used less and less Japanese components and designs. Sony licensed MIPS, and PowerPC, and X86 designs from US companies. Eventually they didn't even design the graphics hardware. I think this is a major mistake. But one problem they had was lack of scale to upgrade to the latest fabrication facilities. Their logic chip production plants are stuck at older process nodes.
They lost the edge on photolitography for several reasons. In the 1990s the US forced the Japanese government to cut subsidized credit to Japanese machine tool and semiconductor vendors. This caused the collapse of the sector in Japan. Then Taiwan started competing in the fab space and South Korea in the memory space.
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A Scottish man looted tea seeds in China for the Brithish East India company in the mid 1800. Europeans tried to copy Chinese porcelain manufacturing technology without success for 400 years. A Frenchman finally stole the secrets from China in the early 1700.
How did European learn making gun powder? Right, they took it from the Arabs which in turn got it from the Chinese. Speaking of Arabs, do you know where the words alcohol, algorithm, alchemy and algebra came from? Ah, the great renaissance started with translating Arabic literatures. How inspiring!
Do you drink coffee? With sugar? Both words originated from Arabic.
The westerners even steal from each others. Do I need to remind you the history of the "Make in Germany" label? The US was a pirate country, too. Go search for "Charles Dickens and the American Copyright Problem" for one example.
Never say ever. Arrogance and complacency are the biggest enemies of all great powers. China learned about it the hard way. The West has had the leading position for merely 400 years out of the 5000 year of written human history. China had that position for more than a 1000 years.
China tech company kylinsoft still trying to get more domestic adoption of linux base OS. This time, they will try to build a linux distribution from scratch using the linux kernal rather than a pre-existing dist like Debian. They will also work on it in a open source community fashion, allowing worldwide developers to work on it.
Seems like UOS or deepin could support Harmony App packages in the future.
This is an interesting move if you ask me, would be nice if Chinese linux distributions build upon HAP app format as a replacement for Debian packages. This kind of seems connected to the Chinese linux distribution going rootless(non-debian) like @daifo posted above.
This is an interesting move if you ask me, would be nice if Chinese linux distributions build upon HAP app format as a replacement for Debian packages. This kind of seems connected to the Chinese linux distribution going rootless(non-debian) like @daifo posted above.