The Computers of Star Trek Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  A Note on the Abbreviations

  Chapter 1 - Footsteps into the Future

  Chapter 2 - A Twenty-Fourth-Century Mainframe

  The LCARS Interface

  The Processor

  Core Elements

  What’s a Nanoprocessor?

  Memory

  Distributed Processing Network

  Personal Access Display Devices

  Yesterday’s Technology, and Tomorrow’s

  Chapter 3 - Security

  Chapter 4 - Navigation and Battle

  Chapter 5 - Artificial Intelligence

  Chapter 6 - Data

  Chapter 7 - The Holodeck

  Chapter 8 - Missing Bits

  The Borg

  Medicine

  Universal Translators

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated with love to my parents, Sam

  and Freda Goldberg.

  Lois H. Gresh

  To Dr. Marshall Sparberg and

  Dr. Karen Spurgash—the best doctors

  I’ve ever met.

  Robert Weinberg

  Acknoledgments

  The authors thank Larry Charet of Chicago, who made available to us his video library of every episode of all the Star Trek television shows as well as the Star Trek movies. Without his help, this book would not have been possible. Thanks also to our agent, Lori Perkins, her associate, Susan Rabiner, and our editor, Bill Frucht, for reasons too many to mention.

  Preface

  Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century with the writings of Shelly, Verne and Wells, science fiction has always tried to describe what might be, what could happen, what life will be like in times to come. Unlike all other fiction, it’s not concerned (at least overtly) with what exists now but what will happen later.

  In 1966, the most popular science-fiction television show ever, Star Trek, sent its crew on an ongoing mission to explore new worlds and seek out new civilizations. A third of a century later that mission continues with new starships and new crewmembers but the same dream. Our fascination with the future remains unquenched and it seems quite possible that viewers will still be watching Star Trek when voyages into outer space are daily occurrences.

  Intelligent plotting, combined with vivid attention to detail, makes the Star Trek universe the most complex future world ever created. It’s a setting that’s been described in more than five hundred hours of television and movies, a half-dozen computer games, a detailed chronology, and an encyclopedia. It has its own language, Klingon, and dozens of international fan conventions. A vast number of novels have been published featuring characters from the various shows. There are Star Trek trivia books, photo books, postcard albums, and several technical manuals. Books have been written about the physics, the biology, and even the philosophy of Star Trek.

  Not surprisingly, events taking place in the universe of Star Trek, three hundred and fifty years from now, are strikingly similar to incidents in our everyday world. This is not only because good storytelling reflects universal human concerns that do not go away with changes in technology (although, as science fiction keeps reminding us, they constantly re-emerge in new guises). The real reason for the similarity is that, after all, no science fiction can do more than project into the future the concerns of the time in which it was written. Every word, every image, every moment of every episode of Star Trek depicts ideas that, by definition, already exist.

  It’s especially important to remember this when examining, as we do in this book, the way Star Trek deals with computer technology. The world of the twenty-third century as envisioned by the original series is based on the technology and culture of the 1960s. The universe of The Next Generation is vastly different, considering the scientific and social changes that took place in the two decades following the first adventures. Today’s adventures, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, reflect even greater changes that have occurred in the past decade.

  These incredible advances are no better demonstrated than in the evolution of computers in the various shows. The giant thinking machines of the original series seem laughably primitive compared to the smaller and much more versatile hand-held units of the 1980s’ Next Generation. Just as the computers of The Next Generation seem archaic when compared to those on Voyager . As our world changes, so does our view of the future world of Star Trek. In a sense, each series is a photograph of tomorrow taken with a camera firmly rooted in today.

  Will the universe of Star Trek ever come to pass? The answer is clear: it won’t. To understand why, you need only look at the shows of the original series and think about how much we’d need to forget in order to build a world like that. But by showing you how each series reflects the ideas and technologies of its time—and even the current shows are years behind what’s happening in the research labs—we hope to get you thinking about how unimaginably different the real future is going to be.

  A Note on the Abbreviations

  For brevity, we have used the following abbreviations to refer to episodes of the various Star Trek television series:

  The Original Series TOS

  The Next Generation TNG

  Deep Space Nine DS9

  Voyager VGR

  Although the words Star Trek are formally part of all the movie titles (e.g., Star Trek—Insurrection), we use only the latter part of the title (Insurrection) except where necessary to avoid confusion.

  Since this book is the collaboration of two authors, the plural we represents the authors’ joint viewpoint. (We definitely don’t have delusions of royalty.)

  1

  Footsteps into the Future

  In the Deep Space Nine episode “One Little Ship,” Chief O’Brien and Dr. Julian Bashir shrink to perhaps finger size and enter the computer consoles of the starship Defiant, trying to find a security protocol interlink. Once inside the computer, they sit on “benches” (which could well be live circuits!), wander among flashing lights reminiscent of LEDs (light-emitting diodes), and then become lost. They manage to find their goal only by using a large isolinear chip as a landmark. Moving huge pieces of hardware around like packing crates, they fix the security interlink. Then they get back into a shuttlecraft, also proportionately shrunk, and fire on some big lizardlike aliens, killing them. The Defiant is saved.

  Of course all this is absurd. The Star Trek computers will have components the size of large molecules (many of their components undoubtedly are large molecules). If O’Brien and Bashir are as big as cockroaches, what exactly are they shoving around? What are those flashing lights for? For that matter, why does the bridge have physical consoles at all instead of virtual-reality projections?

  The universe of Star Trek is a paradise of computers. They’re everywhere and do just about everything. They’re the glue that binds the entire Star Trek phenomenon together. Without them, everything else collapses into sheer fantasy. Without computers, this future civilization would vanish.

  It’s the computers—and everything they make possible—that make Star Trek seem like a show about the future, our future. But how believable is it really? Are these machines actually attainable, and are the tasks they perform possible? Or is much of what we see a sham, a future built on magic and sleight-of-hand, a universe that could only exist on the screen and never in real life? Most intriguing of all, will the Star Trek future fail to happen not because the technology is too outlandish, but because it’s not outlandish enough?

  As we watch Star Trek, we often feel like O’Brien and Bashir. We stumble around, trying to feel as if we�
��re in the twenty-fourth century, but we keep tripping over components that look like leftovers from an old Heathkit catalogue. In part this is testament to Star Trek’s success. It’s only because the show is so interesting and fun to watch that it’s jarring to be reminded we’re not looking at the real twenty-fourth century, only at a twentieth-century drama that, like all science fiction, is more about the present than the future.

  Each Star Trek series reflects a distinct mindset, a projection into the future of the beliefs and concerns of the era in which it was produced. Thus the original series universe of the twenty-third century, as imagined in the late 1960s, is a much different place from the twenty-fourth-century cosmos visualized in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Next Generation was literally the next generation of TV science fiction, and nowhere is this generational difference more apparent than in the characters’ attitudes about computers.

  Computers are everywhere in the later programs. The Enterprise computer is without question the most important system on the ship—as it is on Voyager and every other starship in the Star Trek universe. Computers are at the heart of Deep Space Nine and every other artificial environment. From what little has been shown of life on various Federation planets, as well as the lives of Federation allies and enemies, computers are apparently critical everywhere. The population of an entire world, Bynaus, is so closely tied to the planetary computer that its failure signals the end of all life. (“11001001,” TNG)

  The Enterprise crew in The Next Generation is surrounded by computers and relies on them for everything from food to information to communication to entertainment. The crew even lives with a sentient computer—Data—in its midst.

  Every sentient being in the universe of the twenty-fourth century is computer literate. Episodes of Deep Space Nine that show Keiko O’Brien’s school, as well as Next Generation stories featuring Worf’s son, Alexander, show young children using computers as part of their earliest education. Crewmembers on all of the starships carry PADDs (personal access display devices), hand-held computers that provide instant networking to the ship’s main computer core. In the current shows, being comfortable with computers isn’t merely important or even necessary: It’s inseparable from being a functioning member of society.

  That’s not nearly as true in the original series. In those adventures, the original Enterprise’s life-support, weapons, and navigation systems are obviously run by a central computer. This mainframe processes data gathered from the sensors and tricorders, serves as a huge storehouse of information, and even analyzes difficult social problems (“A Piece of the Action,” TOS). Yet despite the machine’s importance to the ship, a strong distrust of computers is woven into many of the original series’ episodes.

  The late 1960s were a period of great economic and social change in the United States. It was a time when America’s most powerful enemy was a nation in which the ideals of rational order and control had produced a nightmarish, dehumanizing society. The ease with which utopia could shade into dystopia was a major concern for science-fiction writers. Computers were like fire: powerful tools if kept firmly under control. Several episodes reflect the concern that the absolutely rational, collectivist values of the computer would take over and subjugate human freedom.

  The Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock, with his totally logical approach to life, and Dr. McCoy, the emotional humanist, represented the extreme cases for and against computer technology. Captain Kirk occupied the middle ground, relying on both Spock and McCoy for guidance. Clearly, a balanced path between the ideologies was the right choice.

  For example, in “The Conscience of the King,” Kirk suspects that an actor, Anton Karidian, is in reality the notorious Kodos the Executioner, a mass murderer presumed dead for the past twenty years. Spock and Kirk use the ship’s computer to conduct a thorough investigation of the massacre for which Kodos was responsible. They soon discover that most of the witnesses to the disaster have died under mysterious circumstances over the years. Each death took place when Karidian’s theater company was nearby.

  Kirk refuses to be swayed by circumstantial evidence. Instead, he orders a sound scan made of the actor’s voice and instructs the computer to compare the recording with one of Kodos’ speeches. The computer states that the two voices are identical.

  Despite this evidence, the captain still refuses to act. He’s unwilling to trust a machine’s judgment when a man’s life is at stake. So much for twenty-third-century technology.

  When Captain Kirk is brought to trial for killing one of his crew in “Court Martial,” the Board of Review studying the computer transcripts has no such qualms. They know beyond doubt that computers don’t lie. However, Kirk’s lawyer, Samuel T. Cogley, puts his trust in law books instead of computer records because, he tells Kirk, the books contain much more detailed information. Cogley’s defense of Kirk consists of angrily declaring that computer evidence isn’t enough to prove a man guilty. He argues his point “in the name of humanity fading before the machine.”

  This mistrust of computer technology is a recurring theme of the original series. In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk and his crew battle Landru, a giant thinking machine that’s frozen a planet’s society without change for thousands of years to protect the inhabitants from any possible danger. The theme is similar in “The Apple,” in which the immense computer, Vaal, maintains an Eden-like environment for a handful of servants who in return keep it supplied with raw materials. In “The Ultimate Computer,” a near-omniscient computer is given control of the Enterprise during space-war games to prove it can outperform the ship’s human crew. Resulting, of course, in disaster.

  When Star Trek first appeared, in 1966, computers were less than a quarter-century old. Even in the mid-1970s, those of us who were teenage programmers weren’t allowed in the “computer room.” We gave our coding sheets to an engineer who sat behind a bullet-proof glass window. Behind him, huge machines hummed and roared, churned giant magnetic tapes, and spat hardcopies from clanking printers onto the floor. More than anything, we wanted to get behind the glass window, touch the computers, and see how they really worked. But only the elite, the engineers of the computer room, were allowed to serve the god-like machines. The original series computers shared this mystical quality. Massive and unpredictable, they exerted their powers in accordance with inhuman, universal laws.

  The first generation of computers (1945—1956), developed during World War II, were basically huge collections of on/off switches. When grouped together, these switches represented numbers that were then manipulated to solve mathematical problems. Computers were used by the United States Navy, for instance, to create ballistic charts for aiming artillery. The actual switches for these computers were vacuum tubes—large glass tubes in which electric current passed freely between metal wires. On was when electrons were flowing in the tube. Off was when they were not. On paper these two positions were represented by the numbers 1 and 0. Each switch was called a bit.

  Eight bits grouped together—forming a sequence of zeros and ones—were called a byte. A row of eight bits could form 28 or 256 unique strings of ones and zeros. There were enough bytes to represent an entire alphabet, as well as numeric digits and punctuation marks. Bytes soon became the standard unit of measurement of computer storage.

  Because bytes represent such a small amount of information, computer storage is usually described in kilobytes (210 or 1024 bytes), megabytes (1024 kilobytes = 220 = 1,048,576 bytes), or gigabytes (1024 megabytes). A gigabyte contains approximately ten billion bits, or individual switches. The world of computers involves very large numbers. Today, computer storage is escalating into the terabytes—trillions of bytes.

  Working with first-generation computers, engineers were able to perform detailed mathematical calculations by using hundreds or sometimes thousands of vacuum tubes. ENIAC, completed in 1946 by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes and 70,000 resistors, and used over 160 kilowat
ts of electricity each time it was turned on. With each tube representing one bit, ENIAC thus had a capacity of 18,000 bits.

  These primitive vacuum-tube computers were huge. They filled large buildings, generated intense heat, and consumed vast amounts of energy. Running ENIAC dimmed the lights in a large section of Philadelphia. Immense computers were a staple of science fiction of this period. The Krell computer in the movie Forbidden Planet was a first-generation computer, as was the computer in Colossus: The Forbin Project. The bigger the machine, the more powerful the electronic brain. Or so it seemed.

  The year 1948 marked the invention of the transistor by three scientists at Bell Labs. Transistors were solid-state semiconductors that could do the work of a vacuum tube. Basically, transistors are tiny electrical components with a base, collector, and emitter connection. The voltage between the base and emitter determines whether electricity flows or is blocked between the emitter and the collector. In essence, a transistor is no more than a miniature on/off switch, dependent on electrical current. Transistors are just thousandths of an inch wide, and they completely revolutionized electronics.

  The switch from vacuum tubes to transistors led to what was called the second generation of computers (1956—1963). These machines were much smaller, faster, and more energy efficient.

  Equally important, second-generation computers used stored programs, in which the instructions to run the machine for a certain function were inside the computer’s memory and could quickly be replaced by another set of instructions for a different function. First-generation computers could not solve more than one type of problem without placing instruction sequences into the computer along with the numeric data. Stored programs made computers versatile.