-tron

1. Vacuum tube: dynatron.
2. Device for manipulating subatomic particles: betatron.

[Greek, instrumental n. suff..]

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(1) (TRace ON) A debugging command in the BASIC programming language that displays each instruction with its line number when executing. TROFF (trace off) turns off the debugging mode. In the 1982 science fiction film TRON, TRON is a security program used to shut down a malevolent supercomputer.

(2) (The Realtime Operating System Nucleus) An advanced real-time operating system developed by Japanese universities and corporations. i-TRON is a version that is used for microcontrollers in industrial machinery.

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[NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie Tron] To become inaccessible except via email or talk(1), especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: “Ran seems to have tronned on us this week” or “Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself”. One may also speak of tron mode; compare spod.

Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.