DIY Perks' Interrotron[0]

Btw "Tron" the movies are a reference to the BASIC debugging command TRON/TROFF for trace on/off.

[0] https://youtu.be/2AecAXinars?si=fK2Vd1Q2e73IZ3Bq&t=663

Wow this is new to me, but is it true? Sources seem conflicting (on mobile, didn't watch and only did a brief google skim).

Edit: it seems to be false.

https://www.tampabay.com/trons-original-trailer-made-more-se...

> TRON is also a debugging command in the BASIC programming language, meaning "TRace ON." However, movie producers swear they didn't know this when naming the movie and just picked the name from inside the word "electronic."

Wikipedia agrees.

This just confirmed my principally suspicious attitude about trusting videos as sources.

If you clicked on the video it was the DIY perks video...

so? btw i did briefly (on mute) and was wondering it the commenter was joking or trolling, but it doesn't really matter.

My bad, it was the the only video link in the comments and you had said "This just confirmed my principally suspicious attitude about trusting videos as sources." - so I just assumed that was the video you were referring too. Oops.

Yes what I mean is that I just don't care about people supporting arguments online by any video, except when the arguments is about that video itself or events it is depicting. Video is, educational exceptions aside maybe, strictly superfluous or even detrimental as a medium to convey thoughts, except for rare circumstances.

But maybe that's just me.

I didn't hear the TRON/TROFF thing from the video, so I also won't trust comments made regarding a video by someone who hasn't watched it.

It was something that I heard around when the original Tron was released which I saw in theatres.

Ha. My entire career I've named (almost) every program I've ever written something-tron, or more usually, something-o-tron. (Sometimes suffixed with "2000" or "3000" depending on how cool it is.)

I guess this means I really am old now.

gpt-o-tron 3000…

I expect the modern equivalent would be "-inator" as a suffix.

To boost your Perry the Platypus streed cred, definitely.

Andrétron 3000

:D Reminds me of my (very cool) Taskmaster 3000 program.

As the article mentions, "-stat", and "-matic" are two other suffixes that were used to convey high-tech in the mid 20th century. Another one was "-rama" (presumably derived from the Cinerama panoramic technology created to attract viewers back to movie theaters in the 1950s when TV was beginning to take away their audiences).

Or even Futurama from 1939: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_F...

Or -ola a few decades before - Pianola, Motorola, Victrola, Crayola, Granola, Cola...

Emblems of "newness", like coolness, lose that quality pretty quickly. Even post-modern is old hat.

What currently connotes newness? Or is the present age so dystopian and pessimistic that we lack one?

My dental hygienist let slip that her sonic pick tool was branded "Cavitron" the other day. Got a good laugh out of that.

> the suffix ‘tron’ became associated with technological supremacy

I couldn't agree more.

I second this.

I always think of 'trace on' when I see it.

...

...

... username checks out

(gd&r)

By Vectron's mighty claw, so they do!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icTrzUuWlHI

Fascinating. I'd love to see a timeline of all these prefixes/suffixes. I suppose -GPT appears at the end...

Hearkening to electron?

Via Wikipedia:

...the Greek word for amber, ἤλεκτρον (ēlektron).

Then electronics... Electronic or "e-" also made things sound futuristic, especially when the non-electronic counterparts were still common.

electrons are definitely yellow: https://xkcd.com/2734/

The city I live in is sarcastically called "Hamiltron"

> What suffixes and embodied symbols capture the spirit of our own times?

-r jumps to mind

I thought it was ending in "ocom"

It just conveys this optimistic, futuristic attitude. Like you can do anything. The only limit is yourself.

To respond to the highly-editorial HN title with a hot take: "because humans stopped science-ing."

Speak for yourself; lots of humans are still science-ing

A: tron = ‘tool’ in Greek.

I think by now you could start an entire collection of retrofuturistic ideas and expressions that at some point signified progress before falling out of fashion. What I think is interesting though is that sometimes expressions that were thought of as well and truly dead reappear or take on a changed meaning. Two examples:

The e- prefix. It used to be ubiquitous around I think the 90s, but then at some point must have gotten rapidly unpopular and basically vanished. The only place where it survived was in the term "email" as some sort of linguistic fossil. Though recently it seems to come back in terms like "e-commerce", "e-cigarette" or "e-paper".

Cyber-. I think the roots actually predate the computer age with the 19th century field of Cybernetics. From that it took on a strong role in 80s science fiction at the beginning of the internet with visions of augmented humans and livable virtual worlds. Then Gibson gave us the "cyberspace", which became mainstream and for some time described the actual internet - before at some point taking on a terribly stale and outdated feel like "information superhighway". But for some reason the prefix eventually reemerged with a different meaning and today seems to mostly refer to security or military matters with relation to the internet. I'm not sure how exactly this change of meaning happened.

Space Age is a fun one.

If we get far enough, we might have multiple Space Ages-- the original Sputnik-Apollo era, the era when it starts to become viable for ordinary civillians but novel and likely still seeking a killer app, and finally the era where space travel is universal.

Magnetron still sounds futuristic to me.

I guess that you should ask the matron.