Those who are part of the Tron cult understands what the Tron concept is all about. It is not just a willy-nilly fiction story. There's a rhyme or reason to the "grid". This entire concept was made into hodge-podge senseless soup in Legacy!

I'm a programmer. I wrote my very first program (Hello World, of course) in June 1982. I was 12 years old. I didn't know what a computer is. I was in the Philippines - there was not even a single video game arcade in the entire island!

On the first day of programming class, the teacher asked us, what is a computer? And all 8 kids in the class didn't know! So he popped in the Pacman cartridge (yeah there were no hard drives back then) and for the first half of the 3 hour class i played my very first video game. I was crazy hooked on computers since then. By July 1982, i successfully wrote my own Pacman program... Those days you have to program the screen pixel by pixel. There was no such thing as graphical user interface. There was no Windows even, let alone a mouse... The monitor was the T.V., you save your programs onto a cassette tape using your tape recorder. The computer had 16Kb of RAM.

Then Tron came out that summer. Man, it was the movie that defined my programming world! It was so cool that somebody in Hollywood understood my world completely!

See, Tron was a very true to concept movie... The Tron world was simple really - you have "users" who are the real people in the real world who are using the computer.

Then you got the programs inside the computer who are controlled by the users. The awesome concept of Tron is that the programs are represented as people. So the programs take on the image of the user who is either playing the game or created the program (non-game). So that, everything that happens inside the "grid" is controlled by some user somewhere in the real world. In 1982, there was no world wide web. So the grid is limited to the computer network at Encom where Flynn works - or actually got fired from.

So the story is that Dillinger wrote a program for Encom (Master Control Program) for the purpose of controlling all other programs so that Dillinger can do whatever he wants at Encom. Flynn used to program for Encom but he got fired so he started his video game arcade. He found out that Dillinger stole his gaming programs to make it part of Encom (the disk thing, the light cycle, etc.). So he tried to hack into Encom to take it back. That's when he found out about the MCP. So he tries to destroy it. Unfortunately, his friend, Alan, who still works for Encom wrote this security program called Tron so he can't easily kill the MCP.

So Flynn asked Alan to re-program Tron. Alan got Flynn into Encom to hack the network from the inside to re-program Tron but the MCP senses this. To stop Flynn, the MCP used this experimental program that digitizes "real" objects into the computer. That's the suspension of disbelief thing that is easy to accept because it is clearly defined - the real object gets sucked into the computer. The MCP can't control the real world so he digitizes Flynn so he can fight him inside the computer.

Flynn is not a program, he is a user, so he doesn't follow any "rules". Whereas, programs can only do what they are programmed to do. So Flynn goes looking for Tron inside the computer while the MCP tries killing him by making him fight in the gaming programs. Flynn finds Tron and so he takes Tron to the portal (user interface - keyboard basically) so that Alan in the real world can give him the new program to kill the MCP... The program gets written into his disk that he wears on his back. Long story short, Flynn, with the help of Tron kills the MCP, gets out of the computer and lives happily ever after.

See next post for Legacy...