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Interview with Tron Creator Steven Lisberger

Posted by michael on from the glow-in-the-dark dept.

NeoCode writes "AintItCool has posted an interesting interview with the Tron creator Steven Lisberger. He doesn't talk much about the sequel Tron 2.0 (because of a Disney gag order) but he reflects about the original movie with nostalgia. He talks about what influenced Tron and what Tron meant (and still does) to people. Have a read."

2 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. The bit wasn't a bit! by Wee · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Remind me. What was the Bit?
    It was just a bit - the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.

    The computer's equivalent to an atom?
    Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.

    NO! The bit in Tron wasn't a bit at all! It didn't have two states, on and off, yes and no, zero and 1... it had three states: 'yes', 'no', and 'stateless'. It would sit there until Flynn asked it a question and then it would answer yes or no. That's not two states. I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it isn't.

    Now, if they would have had the bit only say 'yes' when the answer to a question was yes (or vice versa: say nothing until the answer is no), then it would have been a bit. Nothing or yes, nothing or no: they should have picked one of those.

    This is just something that's been bugging me since I was like 15 or so is all. Nothing to see, move along...

    -B

    --

    Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.

  2. The movie title may be more clever than you think by ral · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The movie was rendered on a PDP-10 (well, a clone actually, but that doesn't matter) which had an instruction called TRON. I always thought the anti-christ-like character in the movie was so named because TRON's opcode expressed in octal, which was the convention for the PDP-10, is 666.

    Anobody know if it was just a coincidence?