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A Cycle (also known as a Tron Cycle or TC) is a measurement of time used in the Grid. The dialogue in TRON: Legacy, implies that a Cycle to a Grid inhabitant is the equivalent of a year to a person in the real world.
Kevin Flynn mentions that a millicycle is about 8 hours. The metric prefix "milli" denotes one thousandth, which would make a Cycle about 8,000 hours (for comparison, a year is around 365 days or 8,760 hours).
| Grid Time | Real Time | |
|---|---|---|
| 1050 TC | 1050 years | 21 years |
| 50 TC | 50 years | 1 year |
| 1 TC | 52.14 weeks | 7.3 days |
| 137 mTC | 7.143 weeks | 1 day |
| 5.7 mTC | 2.083 days | 1 hour |
| 1 mTC | 8.76 hours | 10½ min. |
| .095 mTC | 0.833 hours | 1 min. |
| .002 mTC | 50 sec. | 1 sec. |
The TRON: Legacy The Official Movie Magazine includes a timeline of the Grid, explaining that time moves faster in the system because its only limit is the speed at which electrons can move in circuitry. The guide states that one year in the real world equals about 50 cycles in the Grid, which would mean that Kevin Flynn was trapped inside the Grid for roughly 1,000 years from his viewpoint. This would seem to be confirmed within the movie itself by Castor's line that Clu had been trying to obtain Kevin Flynn's Identity Disc for 1,000 cycles.
Using the 1 real year = 50 Grid years = 50 Cycles correlation, one can extrapolate the times shown in the table to the right.
In TRON: Uprising, the term "cycle" is used colloquially to mean one workday; General Tesler, waking from sleep, is wished a "pleasant cycle" by the Voice of the Grid.
Notes
- An Intel 8086 Processor circa 1980 has about 8MHz which equals out to about 8 million cycles a second.