The TRON Project, launched in 1984 at the University of Tokyo by researcher Ken Sakamura, aimed to create a vertically integrated computing architecture for all of Japanese society. The project encompassed five sub-architectures, including BTRON for personal computers and ITRON for embedded systems, along with a custom TRON VLSI CPU manufactured by Hitachi and an ambitious character encoding system, TRON Code, supporting a theoretical 1.5 million characters across multiple planes.

Backed by the TRON Association (including Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, NEC, Matsushita, and Toshiba) and supported by MITI as national technology strategy, TRON was royalty-free with open specifications. However, in 1989, a US trade report singled out BTRON as an unfair trade barrier, effectively halting its nationwide school deployment. Meanwhile, ITRON quietly became one of history's most deployed operating systems.

BTRON's desktop pioneered a hypermedia document model where typed document parts replaced files and applications as user-visible primitives, decades ahead of mainstream computing. Conspiracy theories later emerged, including claims that Japan Airlines Flight 123 was crashed to target TRON developers, though no evidence supports this. Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, may have also undermined the project from within.