Comment by mrandish

I forgot to add that in the case of Tron: Legacy's on-screen graphics, the fact they're so good is probably due to a combination of two things. First, the director cared enough to make it credible instead of just plausible. Blocking out and shooting a couple extra rounds of "type, read, then react" can easily add another hour to an already packed schedule which equates to at least thousands of extra dollars and increased schedule risk. There's always pressure from producers to just trim "that techie stuff" from the script.

Second, IMHO, it's likely that the playback team decided to over achieve and spend more time on the project than they were paid for. The guys I met were almost all computer nerd, sci-fi fan, film buffs and this kind of over-achieving occurred fairly often, even on projects where the director didn't care to do more than "plausible", when the playback team liked the project, they'd work late to make it as good as they could. They know at least their fellow computer nerd, sci-fi fan, computer buffs will appreciate it even if no else does. In one case I know of first-hand, the playback team successfully pitched the production on doing a more involved sequence than initially written to make it more realistic.

While the article credits "the filmmakers", the level of Unix veracity and depth seen in those on-screens was almost certainly thanks to one or two playback engineers going above and beyond when the script direction probably just said something as vague as [HE LOGS IN AND LOOKS FOR TRACES OF HIS FATHER, THEN ACTIVATES THE LASER] combined with the director liking the look enough to keep it in.