Why We Still Need a HyperCard for the AI Era
I rewatched the 1982 film TRON for the umpteenth time the other night with my wife. I have always credited this movie as the spark that got me interested in computers. Mind you, I was nine years old when this film came out. I was so excited after watching the movie that I got my father to buy us a home computer—the mighty Atari 400 (note sarcasm). I remember an educational game that came on cassette called “States & Capitals” that taught me, well, the states and their capitals. It also introduced me to BASIC, and after watching TRON, I wanted to write programs!

The Atari 400’s membrane keyboard was easy to wipe down, but terrible for typing. It also reminded me of fast food restaurant registers of the time.
Back in the early days of computing—the 1960s and ’70s—there was no distinction between users and programmers. Computer users wrote programs to do stuff for them. Hence the close relationship between the two that’s depicted in TRON. The programs in the digital world resembled their creators because they were extensions of them. Tron, the security program that Bruce Boxleitner’s character Alan Bradley wrote, looks like its creator. Clu looked like Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges. Early in the film, a compound interest program who was captured by the MCP’s goons says to a cellmate, “if I don’t have a User, then who wrote me?”

The programs in TRON looked like their users. Unless the user was the program, which was the case with Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), third from left.