One interesting detail I noticed on my most recent re-viewing of Tron is that during the scene where Flynn is transported into the computer, you can briefly see that the world he arrives on seems to be sphere-shaped, like a planet. I had previously imagined that the whole digital world was just one flat plane that stretched off into infinity, with the different computer systems being locations in this landscape. But now I imagine that each separate system, such as the ENCOM system, is a separate “planet” in the “space” of the digital world. Come to think of it, the final panel of Tron: The Ghost in the Machine (don’t worry, there’s no spoilers!) seems to be going for this idea as well:
This would mean that communication between separate computer systems, such as via the internet or its predecessors, would be in the form of “space travel” in the digital universe (though interestingly enough, that’s not how the internet is depicted in Tron 2.0). I wonder what the Tron equivalent of a spaceship might look like. Possibly like the Solar Sailer, but that was only used in the film to travel along set beams, across a single “planet”.
