When I say the word "tron", what is the first thing that comes to your min

[TheMightyFavog]

[Shananigans]

1. Gravi-tron...

from the fair. Anyone?

[LoZoccolo]

2. Someone I knew in college wrote a song...

...named "Gravitron".

You're my personal Gravitron.
I stick to you when you come around.

One of the most clever metaphors I've ever heard.

[Voltaire99]

9. Gravitron! Arcade great!

What a dangerously good 80s-era vector graphics lunar lander-style game.

I personally kept my local arcade owner in amphetamines and pornography by pumping quarters into that machine. ;-)

[scottcsmith]

3. You forgot the computer game!

Tron 2.0. Great game.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

31. Ab-so-friggin-lutely!

Heck, it looked better than the movie!!!

[Nevernose]

4. I WATCHED TRON

On twenty hits of acid about 10-12 years ago. It was the defining moment of my life. For a while there, I really understood computers, understood them on a level you fuckers can't even begin to comprehend.

Do you know what it's like to try and type while sensing the electrons flow from your brain (also a computer with tiny glowing people trapped inside), down your arm, to your fingers, actually jump from your fingers to the keyboard, and watch the electrons flow from there?

[KG]

5. awesome, dude.

[pfitz59]

8. Musta been weak-tit ACID!

1 hit of Owsley always did the trick!

[Nevernose]

10. It was actually from a sheet of liquid

Kept in a bottle of blue food coloring. We'd heard that Vitamin C would prolog it, so we had a ziplock baggy full of little white pills under the food coloring. When the police stopped us, we were interrogated mericilessly about the pills ("they're Vitamin C, I SWEAR!"), while the priceless sheet of liquid LSD was chucked on the ground.

I'm only guessing it was twenty hits, because when I squirted it into my frekaing eyeball, one drop became a fifth of the bottle.

It was the day I turned eighteen, the day I graduated from high school, and the day the Grateful Dead came to town. Man, talk about a perfect day...

Fuck it, I'm gonna go listen to Dick's Pick's Volume Four, and see if Budweiser can't do a little something to help me get down memory road...

[TheMightyFavog]

6. If you ever noticed...

Whenever I make a shotr comment in the subject line, and have nothing more to say, I always put the MCP's most famous catchphrase in the message box. End of Line.

[Droopy]

7. Psychotron

An old tune by Megadeth.

"part biotic/ and organic/ not a cyborg/ call him psychotron"

[Heyo]

11. a guy at my work..

want an option... but thats what it makes me think of

[yorgatron]

12. i think it's the end of my username

i can't remember where it was,but i tried to register as just "yorg" someplace,but i had to have at least 7 characters so i added "tron"

[DS1]

13. Blue, lots of blue

then giant flying Ms, then Motorcycles

[gator_in_Ontario]

14. An arcade game from the 80's

it was at my neighborhood Kroger...

[Burma Jones]

24. Yep (n/t)

[camero]

15. Jumbotron

They gotta have a real fancy name for big ass TV in every stadium. :wtf: is up with that?

[ComerPerro]

16. Family Guy

"So what have you been doing with yourself?"

"Oh, I'm the blue guy"

[Fovea]

17. Word association with Tron yeilds two results.

1. TROFF
2. Thing - Trans. Attic Greek.

[JohnLocke]

18. Grovelbot.

[terrya]

19. "Orgasmatron" from Woody Allen's "Sleepers"

:-)

Terry

[Fovea]

20. kick it

kick it gud.

[Rabrrrrrr]

21. TROFF

The old tracer on, tracer off commands in TRS-80 BASIC.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

23. Wow, deja vu

The birth of my computer literacy. TRS-80 Model I. Or, rather, a Brazilian clone thereof. Learned BASIC through a course that came on cassette tapes with the computer.

Mmm, I wonder if there's a good TRS-80 emulator around?

[Rabrrrrrr]

26. That's what I learned on!

TRS-80 Model I, though ours was the "expanded" 16K of RAM version, not the original 4K of RAM.

Ha ha. Too funny - 16K of RAM!

Loading programs with a cassette.

Played a hell of a lot of fun games on that thing; now computer games are mostly really boring. No room for the imagination any more.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

27. Did you type BASIC programs off magazines too?

Tried to make your own videogames in BASIC only to end up with an unplayable, sluggish mess of spaghetti code that would only get 10% faster by compiling it through ZBasic?

Looked at all those pixels on the screens and asked yourself why oh why copuln't you address each one separately?

Played Valkyrie, Santa Paravia, Outhouse?

Thought of a floppy drive as the ultimate monster power upgrade?

By the way, our computer STARTED with 16KB and then was upgradedto 48KB! 1 r001, U 5uX0r5!

[TheMightyFavog]

29. IIRC,

I remember that 3-2-1 Contact magazine had BASIC programs you could do. I could never get one of them to work.

[Rabrrrrrr]

32. Yes - we used to type 'em in from magazines

and wrote a lot of our own programs. I did a somewhat reasonable space invaders type game.

And actually, the pixels could be addressed individually.

The first computer I owned (the TRS-80s were in my junior high) was an Atari 800 with 48K. Had it for maybe a year before I bought a $300 floppy drive for it. $300!!!! For a 5-1/4 inch floppy.

The computer itself cost me about $500, maybe more. I can't quite remember. Expensive little blighter it was, though. Worked a lot of hours in a restaurant to save for that one.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

39. No, they were pseudo-pixels

There was only text mode. In the character set, there were 64 positions reserved to "characters" made from dividing the character cell into 2x3 "blocks" of 4x4 pixels.

http://www.fact-index.com/t/tr/trs_80.html

The video hardware could only display text at 64 or 32 characters wide by 16 lines resolution in upper case. This was because the video memory system only was 7 bits wide. Aftermarket Lowercase upgrades (which were very popular and referred to as the "Electric Pencil Modification" after a popular Wordprocessor of the time) added the 8th bit and through use of a switch, one could go back and forth between the original 7 bit or 8 bit video.

Primitive graphics could be displayed because 64 characters of the character set displayed as a grid of 2x3 blocks. Writing to the screen caused "snow" on the screen because no bus arbitration logic was used to arbitrate between CPU writes to the screen RAM and display logic reads from the same RAM. This was not as bad as a Timex ZX81, where the entire screen flickered, and many software authors were able to minimize this effect. Not withstanding this primitive display hardware many very addictive arcade type games were available for the Tandy TRS-80.

Edit: typo

[Rabrrrrrr]

40. Oh, I see what you meant

Yes, of course, individual pixels could not be addressed. I was taking pixel to mean the larger clumps that TRS called a pixel.

But you are totally correct - no addressing of actual, individual pixels. The Atari 800, though, could. :-)

[Deja Q]

22. Lovely FX, otherwise it's a remake of "The Wizard of Oz", not to forget

the upcoming sequel...

Lovely FX though. What took millions of $ then could be done for $1k now. :eyes:

I gather there's supposed to be a Tron 2.0 movie coming out this summer... :scared: More cheap cashing-in, go figure... Worse, will Tron 2.0 be just as visionary and surreal with the FX, or will they use computers to try to make things look real? Making computer images look real is vogue right now, whatever happened to the cool, surreal, "Mind's Eye" type of stuff?! Remember those videos?

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

34. I don't think it's going to be cheap, cashing-in.

Stephen Lisberger, the creator of the first one, is doing the second one as well. And he got the designers for the "look" of the first one to work on Tron 2.0 (they also helped out with the game) so I think it's going to be as visionary as the first one.
Just easier to make.

I bought the 20th Anniversary DVD of TRON, and watched the "how the heck did they do that?" feature...you would not belive what they went through just to get that cool glowing effect in those shots.
And I foudn out that more scenes and backgrounds were matte-paintings than I'd thought. I thought they were CGI!

[TheMightyFavog]

36. It was all shot on 65mm, as well.

It was the first fim in a long time to be done on 65mm.

[MrSlayer]

25. I think of Sark.

Saaaaaaaaaark all my functions are now yours......take them.

I must have seen that movie 10 times in the theater when it came out.

[baldguy]

28. Venus explaining the atom.

"It means dude."

http://science.csustan.edu/stkrm/MISC/Atom-by-Venus.htm

[populistmom]

30. Jeff Bridges

:shrug:

[Goldberg]

33. Sounds like a shitty disney flick.

[Kat45]

35. A Vietnamese car salesman trying to sell me what I didn't want

His name was 'Tron.' And the movie, too.

[moof]

37. Matrix, thr prequel

n/t

[onebigbadwulf]

38. Family guy where Peter is in the Calvin Klein commercial and asks

"I wonder what the bad guy's name in Tron was... oh now this is going to drive me nuts"

[Rabrrrrrr]

41. Or the one where Peter ends up in the cycle game,

going against one of his former high school students :-)

[Beaker]

42. The Chappelle Show.

specifically the 'Real World' spoof where the one white guy is living with all black roommates...including Dave Chappelle as "Tron"...

[Viking12]

43. Will the DOJ

track me down if I admit it was a fun movie while under the influence of recreational, yet ilegal drugs? :) At least it wasn't steroids. I fthat were the case I'd be expecting a knock on the door from Asscroft any minute.