Tron is the first film to treat the inside of a computer as a PLACE with geography, inhabitants and laws rather than as a metaphor or a screen of text, and the cinematic vocabulary for digital worlds descends from that decision. What The Matrix takes is the premise that a person can be present inside the system as a body, subject to rules that bend for someone who understands the substrate, and that the system's enforcement appears as characters rather than as errors. Agents do what the MCP's programs do. Filed MEDIUM: an ancestor rather than a stated source. The Matrix's own citations are Baudrillard, Japanese animation and Hong Kong action cinema.