On 1/11/2011 4:06 PM, Doug Freyburger wrote:
> We saw Tron: Legacy over the weekend.  It had a plot.
> Some plot anyways.  That was a nice bonus.
>
> Bruce did a great job.
>
> I saw a continuity gaff that might be noticed by folks who
> were already in the computer industry when the original Tron
> came out.  A group from the office went to see the original
> Tron.  When I got back I stopped at the office and logged in
> to check my email.  The message on login was "You shouldn't
> have come back, Flynn".  I figured someone in the group had
> rushed to change the system banner.  Anyways, this was a
> VMS 3.2 system at a time when the current UNIX was BSD
> 4.1 with BSD 4.2 being a fresh release.  Sun was a tiny niche
> player at the time with a brand new manufacturing facility.
>
> When Flynn the younger works on the system he types
> "uname -a" and it says the system is running SunOS 4.0.1.
> That release was 4-6 years after the original Tron movie came
> out.
>

SunOS 4.0.1 was in fact out at the time Flynn would have disappeared. 
However, they changed the name slightly, to SolarOS. Almost "Solaris", 
which was the marketing name Sun later adopted for their OS environment 
that included SunOS 5 (SysV-based, a major change from the BSD-based 
SunOS 4) and OpenWindows. They later back-named SunOS4+OpenWindows as 
"Solaris 1.X".

The architecture was even listed as "sun4m", which would have been 
appropriate for the time. There was still a gaff though - it gave the 
processor type as "i386", which was not a "sun4m"
processor - it would 
have been sparc. The "Roadrunner" i386 based systems I believe would 
have come up as "sun386i" IIRC. That is, unless Flynn had some weird 
hybrid system...

There are some theories that this may not be the actual "grid", but 
simply his workstation that interfaced to the grid.

-Brian
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32