One of my favorite parts of TRON: Ares is when ENCOM’s CEO and her business partner have found a remote complex in Alaska, built by Kevin Flynn. They write a BASIC program to search a file line by line for “PCODE” (in this case, standing for “permanence code”). The first bit of code makes sense (see above).

The second screenshot has a number of issues. We’re missing lines between 70 and 120. Inexplicably, it uses question marks instead of quotation marks. If you delete lines 120 to 150 and fix the question marks, the program would work.

And this screen is just silly, a bit of binary and then “:::HELLO:::” a character at a time. (The first 8 bits are the ASCII code for the colon in binary, but I did not parse any further.)

This is on an IBM 5150 or 5160.

Unrelated fun fact—TRON, short for TRace ON, was a command in Altair BASIC that would print line numbers as execution transferred to them. TROFF turned this functionality off. The name of the movie does not come from this command but from the suffix –tron.

Photo credits: © 2026 Kyle Delaney. Used by permission.