I first saw the most recent Tron Legacy trailer when jwz posted the video a week ago.  I remem­ber see­ing the brief scene when the kid is look­ing at the com­puter con­sole and being mainly focused on the on-screen key­board.  “Oh yeah, I remem­ber that from the orig­i­nal Tron.  They had iPad key­boards long before the iPhone.” But that was about all I took away from the scene.  I watched the trailer again last night, this time in HD, and had to freeze-frame it on that scene,

This time, I focused on the con­sole windows.

This might be where I become “comic book guy” for a bit and geek out over minor details that mean lit­tle, if any­thing.  If you, your­self, are not a geek, please do not mind my geekery.

I can­not say that I know the mythol­ogy of the new movie (and if you do know, please do me a favor and don’t spoil) other than a lit­tle bit time­line from the Flynn Lives web­site for the Alter­nate Real­ity Game pro­mot­ing the movie.  Accord­ing to the site, Flynn dis­ap­peared in 1989.  Pre­sum­ably this com­puter is either the same sys­tem from 1982 (the orig­i­nal Tron movie) or a slightly upgraded one.  Given this infor­ma­tion, I find a few inter­est­ing things about this screenshot:

• The oper­at­ing sys­tem is “SolarOS.”  Given the graph­ics, I find it hard to believe this is the same Solar OS as some guy’s side-project, first released in 2007.  Given the time­line and its sim­i­lar­ity to Unix and X Win­dows, it’s most likely “SunOS” and/or “Solaris” (with the name changed by the movie folks to be not quite so bla­tant), although Solaris did not come about until… 1991? …1992?
• Given the lit­tle con­cen­tric boxes in the upper-right of each win­dow, X win­dow man­ager looks like twm or some vari­a­tion thereof.  (It’s been a while since I have used twm and remember/know lit­tle of its vari­a­tions or forks).
• That win­dow in the back is run­ning top.
• The thing eat­ing up the most process time is Xorg, an Open Source imple­men­ta­tion of X Win­dows.  I’m hav­ing dif­fi­culty com­ing up with a time­line for Xorg, but I’m pretty cer­tain it did not exist until mid-decade — cer­tainly not in 1989, in which case I assume some­body upgraded the com­puter since being installed in the secret back room of Flynn’s.  Maybe he has a ser­vice agree­ment and pays some­one to come along and upgrade the thing.  Or maybe he pops out into the real world for some air (and sys­tem main­te­nance) every once in a while.  Or maybe he just upgrades soft­ware from within the machine — although I’d imag­ine that would be a lit­tle wor­ry­ing if you were liv­ing inside the machine you were upgrad­ing.  Who would restore from backup?  And if you were in the machine, not inter­act­ing with it from the con­sole, why would you care what win­dow man­ager it runs?
• There are a cou­ple of instances of watch.
• Some­thing called “ksof” — is that like lsof?
• The game grid runs on 2.5G of mem­ory?  (This assumes, of course, that the Tron world is entirely con­tained within this sys­tem, and that it’s not just an inter­face con­sole to an even larger sys­tem somewhere.)
• Load aver­ages in the 0.6 and 0.7 range are a lit­tle high, but not horrible.
• Lots of things are run­ning with a “nice” value of –5.
• The fact that there are “0 zom­bies” (zom­bie processes) is prob­a­bly pretty good for the folks in the com­puter.  I’m sure Tron Legacy would be a much dif­fer­ent movie with (un-)dead processes.

Maybe oth­ers can find inter­est­ing tid­bits, easter eggs, or anachro­nisms in the screen.  Sound off in the com­ments if you notice some­thing interesting.

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Tagged as: opensource, screencap, screencaps, solaris, solaros, sunos, top, tron, tronlegacy, twm, unix, xorg