Turbolinux

» see turbolinux.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

turbolinux was asia-coded at the licensing and localization layer. that put it on the wrong side of the world from where i was learning linux. i was on red hat 7 in 2001 in ankara off a ttnet adsl line, then mandrake 9 the year after, then debian woody around 2003 once the cd burner at my engineering school could produce reliable images. turbolinux never showed up on the bookshelf of any istanbul or ankara tech bookstore i walked into. the box copies that mattered for the turkish linux scene were always red hat or suse or mandrake.

turbolinux started in september 1992 as pacific hitech in salt lake city utah, founded by cliff and iris miller in the basement of their home. the first product line was shovelware cd-roms of public domain unix and dos software, sold mail order through computer magazine back covers. they opened a tokyo office in 1993, which over the next four years became the actual center of gravity for the company. the early hit was a yggdrasil-style boxed linux release localized into japanese with kanji input working out of the box, which by the mid nineties was a hard problem nobody else had solved cleanly.

the rebrand to turbolinux happened in 1999. by then the product was the dominant commercial linux in japan and china, and the company was raising the kind of dot-com money the wave was making available. a 57 million dollar round in january 2000 came from intel along with dell and compaq, with promises of pre-installed turbolinux on enterprise hardware in the asia-pacific market. the company filed for an ipo on the osaka stock exchange in september 2005. for a brief window turbolinux was what people in tokyo meant when they said commercial linux.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the asia coding ~

the thing turbolinux did better than anyone else for a stretch was input methods. cjk text rendering, kanji on the console, simplified chinese on the desktop, korean hangul, all working in the default install without the user editing a dozen config files. red hat in 1999 needed serious manual work to get any of that going. the entire japanese corporate linux market through 2003 ran on turbolinux for that reason. fujitsu and hitachi shipped server linux pre-installed with turbolinux for the domestic market, sometimes rebadged with the oem name on the splash screen. nec joined the same arrangement by 2000.

the chinese side was bigger numerically but commercially thinner. turbolinux had a beijing office and a beijing distribution. the chinese government's preference for red flag linux as the official domestic distro by 2002 ate into that market, although turbolinux remained a recognized commercial second option through the mid-2000s.

~ the actual end ~

software research associates osaka acquired turbolinux in 2002 when the dot-com round ran out before the ipo could happen. that was the first of many handoffs. livedoor bought the company in 2004, which gave it three or four years of brand visibility because livedoor was the loudest internet company in japan at the time. then the livedoor accounting scandal in 2006 took the parent into prison and the subsidiary into restructuring. tl holdings absorbed turbolinux in 2009, then renamed itself turbolinuxhd, then geonext, then fht holdings. the product itself kept shipping new releases through 2015 and a final 2018 enterprise release based on openeuler, but it was a maintenance product nobody outside the legacy customer base bought.

on october 15 2019 fht holdings announced the dissolution of turbolinux inc. december 31 2019 was the legal end of the corporate entity. liquidation closed at the end of march 2020. red hat enterprise linux had been the default japanese corporate linux for at least a decade by then. ubuntu had taken the developer mindshare, and the original asia-language advantage had stopped being an advantage once every modern distro shipped working cjk out of the box.

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