I've been misled
Tron for electronic.
I always thought it was from the command "Trace On" shortened to Tron.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, Aliens, TimeCop, Johnny Mnemonic and Elysium all benefitted from the design magic of Syd Mead. He created gadgets, vehicles and locations that might have been science fiction but had a crucial sense of realness and practicality that made us believe in the worlds of tomorrow that we …
Savior of the Earth (1983) aka Korean Tron
Trailer - youtube.com/watch?v=ME5l6UOxask
Full film - youtube.com/watch?v=kuSor3NRdLs
Backstory - youtube.com/watch?v=VMlpEPKZn_U
I was fortunate enough to go to a class in Los Angeles that was instructed by some of the technical folks involved in the film (sadly I don't remember their names). It was 3 or 4 seminars that described the use of computers to generate the digital assets on frames of film. My recollection is that they were using first generation Cray computers to do the work. I was fascinated and eventually worked my way into a graphics career and then an IT career supporting modern video production workstations due to that experience. Thanks for the reminder of my origins. It is not often that I think of that excellent class!
Actually TRON predates that.
OTOH "The Last Starfighter" was essentially done on a Cray 1, at a phenomenal (for the time) 1/24 of real time.
Which saved the film makers a ton of cash.
A magazine article of the time said basically all the systems for Tron were (more or less) bespoke (or heavily moded) number crunchers.
always find ways to give awards to the worst movies... and shows what group of old farts they are
What Mr Weinstein wanted, Mt Weinstein got.
Although hopefully he won't come back from his present situation, and ideally the fat, revolting abuser will enjoy a good long spell in a particularly nasty US prison. Then again, it's all unproven as yet. Maybe he's a really nice guy, and we've got it all wrong.
Some bastards have put LSD in the water supply. Again.
I read the article and came away with the impression that Tron was a good film instead of a boring pile of steaming shite. I hope the LSD stays in the water supply for the next 3 years. I need it so that Trump looks good.
Oh I see your mistake, you watched the remake. No, you see you want to watch the original version.
You see to most of us who were born in the late 60s and 70s we knew computers and films tried damned hard to present us with the best they could do at the time but they always fell slightly short so you know how we dealt with that? Well, we'd all been brought up reading these papery things called books that demanded we have this thing called an "imagination" and that is especially important to have when reading sci-fi. So you see when we played those early video games and watched early sci-fi films we simply filled in the blanks with our imaginations and that lead us to be more rounded, imaginative and creative people. We don't demand that everything be perfectly formed and spoon fed to us. We can ignore the bloke in the naff rubber monster costume, we can ignore the naff dialogue and concentrate on the overarching key messages being put forward in the piece of art. We're not bogged down by all the minutiae so we can head out onto Twitter to complain about every little tiny detail because our favourite thing has some small flaws in it!.
I suggest you take your pathetic millenial attitude that anything prior to 1995 is shite and piss off!!
@Amorous Cowherder
Good comment, apart from one minor error: you're completely wrong about me in every fucking way.
I'm in my 60s. I watched the original Tron and haven't seen the remake. I generally prefer books to films because films are always distorted, abbreviated versions of the book and therefore always disappoint to some extent.
Even though I prefer books, I can enjoy films despite crappy special effects, as long as they have a good plot. I can forgive poor special effects, poor characterization and even bad acting, as long as the plot is coherent, consistent and does not contain contradictions. When the plot is a pile of steaming crap then special effects, characterization and acting cannot rescue a film, as far as I am concerned.
The plot of Tron was just fucking idiotic. Crappy as the special effects might have been compared to what can be done today, they far outshone the plot.
Subtracting the downthumbs I got from Big John and bombastic bob for attacking Trump, that means at least four other people thought Tron was a good movie. *sheesh* What is wrong with you people?
@ravenviz
Your comment and another comment in the thread made me think. Since the cowherder got everything about me (apart from the fact I thought Tron was a bad film, and I'd already made that obvious) completely wrong, I'll return the favour.
My guess (probably as wrong as the cowherder's) is that those people who thought Tron was wonderful were under 30 when they first saw it, and at the time they saw it hadn't seen many films with better effects made after it.
In fact, I'd guess the majority were under 25 when they first saw it.
In fact, I'd be surprised if many of those who think Tron was great were over 20 when they saw it.
I'll make another guess. If they watched the original now they'd think it as flawed as they say the remake is.
Pong was the first economically successful commercial video game. I played the first commercial game called "Computer Space", which was Bushnell's earlier endeavor with Nutting Associates.
A beautiful blue-cabinet Computer Space appeared in the local electro-mechanical arcade for about two months. It was very ahead of its time, nobody knew what to make of it. Everyone found the Right-Left-Thrust-Fire controls confusing, ironic considering how ubiquitous that format would soon become.
Pong gets all the fame, but it was dumbed down so the shuffling public could handle it. Computer Space was a much more interesting game. You can find good emulators for Computer Space, and if you're interested in game history you should track it down.
IIRC, Computer Space was itself not actually the first Video Game (may have been the first commercial one), but was itself a version of 'Spacewar' which was built at MIT.
However, the American Physical Society does have a page up claiming that a version of Pong was itself the first actual video game back in 1958 ... so who knows ????
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm
https://www.jesperjuul.net/thesis/2-historyofthecomputergame.html
People quote Steve Russell as being the first computer game writer with Spacewar but the first computer game was by Willy Higginbotham, who worked for the Dept of Defence, when he used an oscilloscope to make a simple game of tennis which he exhibited and allowed people to play way back in the late 50s.
The video game that became Pong was invented at Sanders Associates (then headquartered in Nashua NH and now part of BAE SYSTEMS) by Ralph Baer and a supporting engineer (forgot his name, but it appears in the article at http://www.ralphbaer.com/video_game_history.htm). I recall seeing it working as a breadboard in a lab at Sanders. Every video game is a refinement of past games, but the originator of the Pong type games should not be buried by history.
A game named Space Wars was running on a PDP-1 at MIT even earlier, but this would be better assigned to the evolutionary path of computer games rather than to video games displayed on home TVs.
The "Bit" was one of Tron's CG characters, rendered as a morphing 3-D solid, and was coded in APL. Judson Rosebush of Digital Effects arranged to use late night CPU cycles on STSC's mainframe APL time sharing service, at an extremely deep discount from normal rates. APL's matrix operations made 3-D transform calculations very straightforward to code, though hideously inefficient in those pre-GPU days.