What was mind-blowing was the aesthetics, and the concept of being “beamed” or digitized into a computer. I didn’t care a lot as a kid what was CGI or not.

The aesthetic choices for those "not CGI" scenes rarely get the praise they deserve. That high contrast b/w film stock that looks like straight out of something Fritz Lang if you ignore the neon overlays, brilliant. That's why it's aging so well, it simply does not look as "1982" as it could have, it looks like the entire history and future of movies at once.

Perhaps the most important role of the CGI is that of a distraction, because aesthetic choices like that tend to work best when you are not aware of them.

Tron led me to code a 2D version of the lightcycle game on the C64, but it was super slow because I didn’t know assembly :). I then added random obstacles to the playing field to make it more interesting. A good friend later wrote Armagetron.