A world inside the computer where man has never been. Never before now.
Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a games programmer/video arcade owner. He used to work fro ENCOM until they stole all his ideas and fired him. Now Flynn is trying to find proof that the games, which have become immensely popular, where actually his ideas. All his hacking and cracking attempts from outside are stopped by ENCOM's MCP (Master Control Program). He needs to get inside the ENCOM building to a unrestricted terminal. With the help of some friends he gets inside and begins to use a terminal in a research lab of ENCOM. This lab is where they are researching matter/energy conversion (deconstructing and reconstructing material objects to and from energy). The MCP takes control of the "laser", deconstructs Flynn, and brings him in the ENCOM mainframe as a "program." Flynn learns that the MCP is a tyrannical dictator over all the programs in the mainframe and if programs don't follow it they are forced to combat on the Game Grid till they de-rezz (die). Also the programs have a sort of religion revolving around their "users." Now Flynn must find Tron (Bruce Boxleitner). A system security program that is probably the only program that can defeat the MCP. And hopefully get back to the Real World.
Classic computer movie. Awesome special effects for 1982. The director really used what he had well. If you use your suspension of disbelief and don't think about what actually goes on inside a computer this is a great movie. Sit back, relax, and just watch it as a entertaining adventure movie. Some of the computer landscapes were really cool. The gladiator games were awesome. I remember vividly being amazed after seeing this movie the first time. I continued to enjoy it on repeated viewings.
A Java version of Tron is available at www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu; they are training the robot player with the genetic algorithm. It is actually pretty good, but I find human players more interesting.
TRON stands for TRACE ON, and sets the BASIC interpreter into a debugging mode. Every time a new line of the BASIC code would execute, the line number would get PRINTed. Presumably, the programmer would be able to see whether all of the lines in a subroutine were being executed as expected.
In the movie, Tron was a program that was designed to audit the other programs running in the mainframe computer. Metaphorically the same sort of idea.
The command to turn off BASIC Trace mode was TROFF, not to be confused with the Unix command troff(1) (table run-off formatter).
Troll-O-Meter = T = true-hacker
tron v.
[NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie "Tron"] To become inaccessible except via email or talk(1), especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: "Ran seems to have tronned on us this week" or "Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself". One may also speak of `tron mode'; compare spod.
Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.
--Jargon File, autonoded by rescdsk.
EDIT ME! The Everyone Project. Log in: "everyone" Password: "everyone" First created by: rescdsk Modified by: (nobody)
The machine featured an unusual control arrangement consisting of a joystick (translucent and backlit; 'Tron' was a big-budget affair, just like the film) and a paddle. Gameplay was divided into four sections, on completion of which the game became harder. The sections were:
The tank bit, in which the player drove a tank around a maze in the manner of 'Wizard of Wor', but with an independently-traversing turret; The famous bit, with the light cycles, in which the player must lure opponents into a trail of light laid down by his or her motorbike; The grid bug bit, based on a creature barely seen in the film, in which the player had to shoot bugs which blocked the path to a transporter. This was very dull and became extraordinarily hard in later levels. The player character's arm was controlled independently of his body, and could be made to perform some intricate dances and Nazi salutes; a similar control method appeared many years later in the PC game 'Trespasser'; The 'Breakout' / 'Gorf' bit, in which the player had to shoot holes in a moving wall.
All four sections had to be completed in order to progress to the next level. Levels were named after programming languages, such as BASIC and PASCAL. After the first level the game became almost impossibly hard, and it was one of the earliest games to have a 'continue' option.
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Apart from the arcade machines, 'Tron' was mined for inspiration by countless computer games. Apart from the standard 'Light Cycle' clones, there were several 8-bit games based on the 'driving a tank through a valley, shooting at hovering enemies' section (Steve Turner's 'Seiddab Attack' being the most memorable), and Jeff Minter's 'Gridrunner' was based loosely on the 'flying a spaceship along a wire' section.
Although the film was touted as being a festival of computer graphics, it apparently only features fifteen minutes of proper CGI; the backdrops, sets and most of the landscapes are actually airbrushed art. In 2002 Disney released it on DVD, in a two-disc set with lots of extras; furthermore, they released Wendy Carlos' soundtrack for the first time on CD. Coupled with the re-release and rediscovery of much media from the late-70s and early-80s it would appear that late-twentysomething adult males are the new teenage market.
"You ain't making me talk, Mr high and mighty Master Control."
TRON is a multilingual character set designed in Japan as part of the larger BTRON system. This will largely be a rant, as I can not speak fully about the system; why should become obvious shortly.
I have nothing against Japanese as a language, but it's not a language everyone is fluent in. In fact, besides the Japanese themselves, not very many people know Japanese. Compare this to English, French or Spanish, which are learned by a lot of students that don't have that language as their native tongue. Even Latin, Esperanto or Latino sine Flexione would have been a token effort towards Indo-European language speakers.
A substantial part of every English TRON webpage seems to be given over to telling us how Unicode is made by American Computer Companies and how they are trying to oppress the poor Japanese. (Occasionally, we get to hear about how the creators of Unicode are Sinocentric, too.) All of which is fine and good, but honestly, most of us don't care. Most of us are interested in how well it works for me and my projects; telling us how well it supports Hindi and Cherokee and mathematics and APL is more likely to catch the world's attention then whining about Japanese repeatedly.
The argument that Unicode is the product of American computer companies has some merit. But Unicode can point to its close association with ISO; and while the list of full members is packed with American companies, the list of associate members includes groups like "Hong Kong Telecom CSL" and "Government of Tamil Nadu, India". Where are the non-Japanese groups involved in TRON? As far as I can tell, there are none. Judging from their webpages, I get no impression that they have any interest in supporting anything besides Japanese.
While I'm not as qualified to speak on the technical reasons, not reading Japanese, I will give it a try.
This one has many twists and turns. Starting off with a minor social reason — saying you support me (everything besides Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) by including most of Unicode does nothing to induce me to switch from Unicode. Especially when you mention Unicode 2.0, which is missing many fun things present in Unicode 3.2.
Also, copying stuff does not make for good integration. TRON does not support combining characters (more on that below; what happens to the combining characters in Unicode? What about the languages that weren't explicitly supported in Unicode because they could use combining characters, like Sioux or Lakota or Navajo or the student orthography of Lithuanian (with additional accent marks)? Is it updated with Unicode (apparently not)?
Unicode has this problem to some extent, as some Unicode blocks are copies of old standards (ASCII became Basic Latin; ISO-8859-1 became the Latin-1 block; ISO-8859-7 became the basis for the Greek block.) TIS-620 became the basis for the Thai block, meaning that Unicode adopts the typewriter order for Thai characters, instead logical order, which is used for the rest of Unicode. But they were copied into Unicode and became part of Unicode, subject to all the rules thereof, and nothing too awful was permitted. For example, Unicode followed ISCII, but made a seperate copy for each script instead of following ISCII's lead in using script selecting control characters. Unicode also never tried swallowing 8,000 characters without change, like TRON did by accepting Unicode.
TRON repeatedly attacks Unicode for Han unification, claiming that it was a decision soley made for making it simpler for the computers. (While most Unicode gurus will argue long and hard for Han unification, they will admit that starting out with 16-bits was a simplification, that they knew would have to be worked around (and has been). They would however argue that it never could have succeeded if they had said 32-bit from the start.) This, however, seems to be a similar decision on TRON's part. Combining characters are necessary for many languages in the world. While precomposed characters (at least a thousand) could be added for them, this is not true elsewhere. Both mathematics and linguistics use the ability to add arbitrary combining characters to any character, and can't be reasonably supported by adding precomposed characters. The sole justification for this appears to be that composing characters violate the priniciple of fixed length characters.
TRON has apparently encoded the same character repeatedly by reference to other character sets. This seriously hurts searching and fontmaking.
The only non-Japanese characters mentioned on the English webpages are Braille characters. Thomas Chan of Cornell believes that TRON is missing even the most basic Cantonese and Hong Kong Chinese characters (of which there are several, because they aren't included in the very basic Chinese character sets that TRON references. Outside Braille and the CJK character sets that TRON references, there's no evidence they went any farther then referencing the Unicode book on this subject.
I could go further with the technical reasons, but I lack sufficent solid evidence. Honestly, I think the social reasons are more important; if developers seriously interested in your product can't get past them, how are the technical reasons going to come into play?
For all the claims about being a multilingual character set that will take over the world, I doubt even the developers believe it, except possibly a few with a Japan-centric view of the world. Compare TRON's rants about Americans to Unicode's "When the world wants to talk, it speaks Unicode" (an old slogan, but memorable). You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Unicode also works with ISO 10646 and various governments (Iran!) and groups to produce something that is obviously more than merely the work of American computer companies with no respect for the languages. TRON is preaching to the converted, and that's not the way to overtake Unicode.
Backward compatibility slowed down technical innovation in microprocessor design.
Computer systems were designed to handle English, which uses a one-byte character system, and hence could not efficiently process Japanese, which uses a two-byte character system.
Microprocessors and their operating systems were not designed for real-time processing
There was no standardization among the various computer systems in use and many technical details of the proprietary systems that had become de facto standards were not made public
To the dismay of developers who are commited to Unicode, the TRON Association opted for their own version of a sort-of superset of Unicode called the TRON multi-lingual large character set processing environment. TRON uses multiple character sets in a standard called the TRON Application Databus(TAD). TRON specifies the support for a light version of Unicode (Unicode minus Unihan), along with other previously existing East Asian character encodings. TAD switches between various character sets in a manner that is a bit more complicated than ISO-2022. More TAD info at: http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/tadenvironment.html
History grabbed from: http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/projecthistory.html
Film: Tron Year: 1982 Rating: 3/5 Summary: A unique, stylised fantasy world come to life.
First off, the plot of Tron is complete fantasy, and while it sort of works as a story of people fighting against an evil totalitarian government, you have to suspend your disbelief that half of the characters are anthropomorphic computer programs. This is a shame because the kind of people who watch films about computers are usually the same kind of people who too often take things literally.
Tron seems to work better as a metaphor for the Roman Empire, with slaves battling to the death for the amusement of others. There also appear to be one or two references to the films of George Lucas, such as the guards poking hapless citizens with large electronic sticks, spaceships slowly flying past the camera to reveal more and more of their gigantic size, and the general theme of being stuck in an electronic labyrinth.
Further requiring you to suspend your disbelief, the acting isn't always brilliant, but given that the actors often had to react to crosses of tape representing baddies or epic landscapes while running around in a darkened room, you can't blame them.
No one is likely to watch this film for the plot or the acting, however. It works better as an hour and a half showcase of cutting edge technology, wild imaginations, and most of all, painstaking hard work. Everything in the computer world is stylised, consisting of straight lines and simple curves made out of glowing neon. Despite the standard plot and acting, the movie captivates you, immersing you in its unique world of bright lights and geometric shapes.
To say that the special effects are good is an understatement. Rather than try to make computer generated images that look organic - an impossible task at the time anyway - painstaking effort was put into making the actors look artificial, and the effect is just as seamless. Even decades after the film's release, it's hard to guess which combination of techniques was used to produce any given shot.
As a movie, the plot is rather simple and unlikely to sustain an adult's interest, but as an experiment showing how a film can give you a glimpse into an alien world, it will likely inspire children, animators, programmers, graphic designers, and artists. No other film offers anything like its experience. It is truly unique.
Tron (?), n.
See 3d Trone, 2.
© Webster 1913.
printable version chaos
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