Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Only this time he's not a Gates or a Jobs. He's not, thankfully, even a Yank.

He's a stupendously talented university professor from Tokyo and he is, say some, the new Daddy of ubiquitous computing.

Professor Ken Sakamura's Tron OS is certainly ubiquitous enough already to allow him at least half of that title.

So far he's been father to 3 or 4 billion of his uncrashable little OSs destined for mobiles and other electronics.

This fact might have you very sensibly thinking the inventor could be burning used Yen notes to heat up his warmed sake.

But no. Like some East of Java Father Christmas, the very generous Sakamura and his even more generous Tokyo university decided to give Tron away. Information must remain free, he says, if we don't want to hold back progress.

Back in the dark days of 1984, some Americans - who had probably just put down a copy of Orwell's dystopian vision named after that very year - decided to put the jackboot into the face of Sakamura's rather promising and attractive Tron project.

The US trade representative in Japan later designated the Tron technology as an unfair trade barrier candidate. It was a decision that was quickly lifted (as we know, you can't ban an OS) but the damage had already been done.

For fear of alienating its rich US markets, the Japanese government and electronics companies dropped Tron as a potential OS for mainframes and other high-end computerised gizmos. Windows would be safe to colonise nearly every PC in existence with its overpriced, mad-as-sixpence OS.

As Sakamura puts it in his understated manner: "I can certainly say that that political move hindered the acceptance of Tron very much."

The Japanese, though, are not ones to have such trifles as total defeat and abandonment dent their determination. Soon the prof turned his energies to miniaturising the OS into a form that would fit in a tiny chip.

With its open architecture, speed, reliability and low cost (well, no cost), Tron once again became the darling of Japan's electronics companies who wanted it for running their very clever gadgets, car computers and mobiles.

Now, even previous rival Microsoft has decided to join forces with Tron.

As consumer demand shifts away from PCs and towards digital home appliances and mobiles, an alliance with the wildly popular Japanese OS was obviously a must.

Not content, Sakamura says he is ready to take Tron a step further and have it at the heart of all embedded devices come the days of ubiquitous computing.

In such a cyber society where every object can talk to the next and all our information terminals are connected, Sakamura sees himself as a kind of architect.

He could be the architect, if Tron makes it as a Global Protocol. One thing's for sure: the days of an industry standard as powerful as Windows are over.

When we do give the heave-ho to chunky hardware and bloated OSs, it could well be the Tron system that will step in to be the standard.

And why not? After all, its key features are a high degree of standardisation and added functions for increasing software compatibility.

To boot, Sakamura believes he has solved the security issue that has left a large question mark over the future of doing business on such open networks.

He has invented an eTron chip that he says can absolutely guarantee security and privacy.

In Japan, they are busy trying out the basic concept already, with RFID tags attached to radishes for food traceability and folks swinging through train station turnstiles invisibly paying with non-contact tickets.

Sakamura also has good reason to be confident about his projects - he has more than 300 companies behind forums he has set up for Tron and his RFID tag system, including major IT companies and telcos. This time Tron will not be so easily trodden on.

Michael Fitzpatrick is a writer on technology issues based in Tokyo.