So, first post, decided to find a big Tron forum to discuss my idea. Hopefully this will lead to an interesting debate =)
So I started playing Tron 2.0 again yesterday after having found the CDs for it, then I rewatched the trailer, and it got me thinking. Specifically about the following piece of dialogue.
Sam- "Dad?"
Flynn- "Sam."
Sam- "Long time."
Flynn- "You have no idea."
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I didn't give it much thought when I first watched the trailer, but having played a bit of the game again, I had something of an epiphany.
In the game, there are several points where a program will say something along the lines of "this is gonna be a busy microcycle," or "have a nice microcycle." This must mean that in the computer world, time is measured in CPU cycles. I get the impression that "microcycle" is the equivalent to "morning", "afternoon" and "evening", and by extension a full cycle would be the equivalent of one day. This seems to me to work out quite beautifully since one cycle is made up of three parts: fetch command (morning), decode (afternoon), execute (evening).
A CPU cycle takes a fraction of a second from our perspective. In the 20 years that Flynn has been trapped in the computer world, he would have experienced some odd
billions of CPU cycles. From his perspective, it would mean he's been in the computer world for centuries. Maybe even
millenia. And perhaps that explains why the computer world has changed so, from the more abstract, brightly-coloured version of the original film to the darker, more realistic version in this upcoming sequel.
Or maybe I'm nuts. What do you guys think?