Why did words that end in "tron" once sound so futuristic? (2017)

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).

s_dev• 3 years ago

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

stereo• 3 years ago

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

hyperthesis• 3 years ago

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?

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

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.

steve1977• 3 years ago

gpt-o-tron 3000…

hawkesnest• 3 years ago

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

xg152• 3 years ago

To boost your Perry the Platypus streed cred, definitely.

euroderf• 3 years ago

Andrétron 3000

lagrange77• 3 years ago

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

yrro• 3 years ago

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

Karellen2• 3 years ago

By Vectron's mighty claw, so they do!

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

beej71• 3 years ago

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

karmakaze2• 3 years ago

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

moritzwarhier3• 3 years ago

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.

djmips2• 3 years ago

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

smitty1e• 3 years ago

Hearkening to electron?

Via Wikipedia:

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

signaru• 3 years ago

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

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

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

damiankennedy• 3 years ago

The city I live in is sarcastically called "Hamiltron"

z500• 3 years ago

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

-r jumps to mind

torstenvl• 3 years ago

I thought it was ending in "ocom"

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

drewcoo• 3 years ago

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

bigfishrunning• 3 years ago

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

hateful• 3 years ago

A: tron = ‘tool’ in Greek.

xg152• 3 years ago

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.

hakfoo• 3 years ago

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.

ericfrazier• 3 years ago

Magnetron still sounds futuristic to me.

cafard• 3 years ago

I guess that you should ask the matron.

Why did words that end in "tron" once sound so futuristic? (2017)

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