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What impact did Star Trek have on the computer?

P

per

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I haven't seen the new movie yet, but I just recently though about one thing.

How would the computer have been without Star Trek?

One thing is sure, the Altair 8800 would not have been named "Altair", but that's really not too significant. What I was more thinking of was that how would the sales of the early micros (like the Altair 8800) be if there was no Star Trek. If Star Trek caused more people to wish they had their own computer then, the microcomputers would problably never have been as widely used as they are today if there was no Star Trek.

I didn't live in 1975, so I'm asking you.
 
The one thing that jumps to mind is memory cards. The little multicolored blocks they used in all the Trek "terminals" look very much like the memory cards or today.

Another neat point is the kind of computing they did, even up to TNG-- they used the server/client idea, where there was one large ship computer doing all the work and terminals throughout the ship to access it.
 
per said:
I haven't seen the new movie yet, but I just recently though about one thing.

How would the computer have been without Star Trek?

One thing is sure, the Altair 8800 would not have been named "Altair", but that's really not too significant. What I was more thinking of was that how would the sales of the early micros (like the Altair 8800) be if there was no Star Trek. If Star Trek caused more people to wish they had their own computer then, the microcomputers would problably never have been as widely used as they are today if there was no Star Trek.

I didn't live in 1975, so I'm asking you.
Click to expand...

Apparently there was some fans at IBM. Two IBM SCSI controllers are commonly referred to as ¨Tribble¨ and ¨Spock¨ (a later SCSI adapter and components were nicknamed after cars). A codename of an OS/2 release was ¨Worf¨.

EDIT: On anther note, ¨2001 ASO¨ is dead-on for me and computers sometimes: ¨I´m sorry Dave, I can´t do that.¨...
 
Last edited:
ziloo said:
Per, I have read several versions of the "Altair" story; would you please
tell me which one you have in mind?

ziloo
Click to expand...

I'm thinking of this reference.

When Ed Roberts asked her daugther what she thought the microcomputer should be named, she replied: "why don't you call it Altair - that's where the Enterprise is going tonight.". She problably refered to the episode "Amok Time".
 
The biggest thing I remember playing with as a kid was the tricorders (ok, as kids we probably ended up playing with our parents polaroid cameras if we didn't have one) or pretend communicators. I'd be curious since the cell phone we have today with flip phone obviously appears similar to star trek communicators.

Other than that most sci-fi shows seem to indicate that we should be concentrating on improving speech recognition and synthesis so we can ask our computers questions and our little holographic maid will appear and tell us the answer. (Cooking instructions, car question, vintage computer question while resoldering something lol).
 
Isolinear chips comes to mind when I see CF Cards..

Communicator beam me up Scotty, Cellphones :p
 
I was wondering how things would be if the creators of all those gadgets had taken the time to apply for patents on their ideas. Would the cell phone / PDA / Computer companies be paying licensing fees to the Star Trek prop creators?
 
I think Dr. Who (at least from my parents point of view) probably just caused the repeated loss of their tire gauge when I was young.
 
I think orac from Blakes 7 might have had some indirect influence in a lot of pc case mods.
Orac.jpg
 
Origin of the "Altair" name

Origin of the "Altair" name

per said:
I'm thinking of this reference.

When Ed Roberts asked her daugther what she thought the microcomputer should be named, she replied: "why don't you call it Altair - that's where the Enterprise is going tonight.". She problably refered to the episode "Amok Time".
Click to expand...

I stumbled over another piece of information about this which was
a lot of fun to read:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.cpm/browse_thread/thread/97eb2e9390f798d0?hl=en#

ziloo
 
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