What are your thoughts on the idea of communication without an I/O Tower?
I know the 1982 Tron movie gives the impression that programs can ONLY ever contact their Users at the I/O Tower. Or, at least, it implies that Tron can only do it that way.
But that can’t be true for all programs, can it?
In real life, some programs can’t really even do their job without constant user input. And even the movie seems to show Clu and Flynn communicating in real-time. Which, yes, could be interpreted as them both talking to themselves as they imagine a dialogue with each other (the novel’s version of the scene works better with this interpretation). But it also seems that Flynn is watching and guiding Clu through the system as he goes, and if that’s how Clu is meant to work, then I’d imagine he could be the type of program who needs some kind of ongoing User communication.
This is a snippet of how I explored the idea in my self-indulgent OC story, “A Lightcycle Built For Two”… but I’d be very interested to hear other takes on it!
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Simplified explanations said that the only place for Programs to communicate with Users was at an I/O Tower. In practice, though, it usually wasn’t so simple, especially these days.
Of course there were plenty of the semi-autonomous programs that did their work behind the scenes, directly with other programs or with the System, and only ever checked in with the Users for scheduled reports or upgrades. Antivirus programs and firewalls, certainly, and everyone else involved in the most basic maintenance…
But there were also countless programs whose very function couldn’t be done without frequent User interaction. The word-processing programs, the graphic editors, the very code editors and compilers that the programmers used in writing new software.
Even Aster herself, in some of her work. Like that punctuation replacement job… and of course her part-time Arcade job, appearing on the User end of the aerobics game as Lana, that cheerful animated fitness instructor, dancing and jumping as she chirped encouragement at the players.
Aster knew there was lots of communication like that going on. The plain, ordinary kind that was just part of a job.
What had just happened here, on her lightcycle comm, was… basically that. Sort of.
Very loosely.
It was very much not the standard way that was supposed to work.
Everyday, non-I/O-Tower contact was mostly just signals. Simple ones. Like feeling the Call to the Tower, if you could strip away the whole supposed erotic/spiritual feel of it, then divide it into a couple different sensations like binary yes and no, and use that to encode a little task-specific assortment of commands and replies…