So, something's always bugged me about Tron.

For a while, I was amused by the idea of the MCP being the OS (and the allusions to it being a game itself originally led to amusing ideas that Windows was an oppressive MCP grown from Solitaire), but as I thought more and more about it, wouldn't the OS be what all of these processes were running around within? The manefestation of the virtual world itself?

So, what then could the MCP've been? It obviously didn't have full control of the system, else it could've terminated the little programs running around inside of it pretty easily.

Also, the various games in the gamegrid were obviously programs themselves, but the players within them were also programs, albeit anthropomorphic ones.

Were they sentient like Crom and Tron and the such, but "doing their job" instead of assuming the weird avatar things running around? When Crom was actually doing his whole accounting software gig instead of poorly playing at Digital Gladiator did he take the form of a spreadsheet or somesuch?

...don't act like you haven't thought about this!

Not necessarily... think of it as in the *NIX world. Cocoa, Carbon, and The Finder are all parts of the OSX operating system, but The Finder can't control the Mach Kernel without an escallation of priveledges, usually with the approval of the administrator. Likewise, KDE, Gnome, and X11 are all parts of the RedHat, Debian, and Suse operating systems, but none of them have control over the Linux kernel.

Similarily on Windows, Explorer is an ingrained part of the operating system... and if it wasn't for the crappy security seperations in Windows, it wouldn't be able to modify the bloated registry and kernel bringing the system to a grinding halt. Come to think of it, I'd liken the MCP to Explorer for its invasiveness and maliciousness. It is part of the OS, but for security reasons is somewhat restricted from absolute full control over the underlying kernel.