Yeah, in my own post-1982 Tron headcanon I definitely imagine there was greater and greater knowledge of the human world among programs as time went on.

I hinted at this in my first post-1982 fic (“Cheat Codes”) …and then went really really deep into it with “A Lightcycle Built For Two,” where the main character is a pattern recognition program in 2012, with an unusually detailed knowledge of the User world because she’s trained on so many different datasets.

I imagine that by that time, there would be a lot of programs who had similarly extensive access to User data. Anyone whose function involved accessing the Internet, or managing files downloaded from online… there’s just so much.

Of course, not all programs that manage information would be able to process it in a way that would allow real understanding. And even if they could, they wouldn’t have the sort of context that humans have to understand it all….

(I have written some scenes in fanfic set during the 1982 movie where Ram and Tron say some User-world terms that they clearly only “know” from mentions in documents from their own libraries… and while they do use them somewhat appropriately in context, their understanding comes solely from the context they were able to find in those libraries, so it’s very very limited.)

But I still agree that with more programs getting wider and wider access to more information– and assuming a real living society in there, where programs share their knowledge with each other just because they want to– they’d have a clearer idea of the User world every year.