The Computers of Star Trek Read Free

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.
    Another advance in second-generation computers was the development of programming languages. These languages, including COBOL and FORTRAN, replaced the zeros and ones (the binary code) of first-generation machines with words, numbers, and instructions. Developing specific programs for these machines led to the development of the software industry.

    The computers featured on the original series are first- and second-generation machines—projected three hundred years into the future. Thus on the original Enterprise , specific computers handle specific problems—the ship has a library computer, a science computer, a translator computer, and a computer used for navigation. “Futuristic” means they work at incredible speeds and contain vast amounts of information. Many of them are extremely large. Like their primitive ancestors, when pressed to their limits, the machines tend to overheat. Landru, for example, self-destructs in a thick cloud of smoke.
    Though larger and faster than the computers of the 1960s, the original series computers display little imagination or innovation in their basic design. Many of them print answers in machine language that have to be translated. Although most original series computers understand English (and even translate languages from alien cultures into English), most can’t handle simple graphic displays. They are artificially intelligent in that they understand questions, but they are extremely limited in extrapolating data and reaching conclusions. These computers represent the future as envisioned through a narrow tunnel from the past.
    The problem of computer overheating was solved in the real world by the development of a third generation of computers (1964—1971), which used silicon chips for transistors. The first integrated circuits, invented in 1958, combined three transistors on a single chip. This was quickly followed by the packing of tens, hundreds, and later thousands of transistors onto one chip. The smaller the transistor, the less distance electricity had to travel and the faster it worked. As component size shrank and more and more transistors were squeezed onto a single chip, computers became faster and smaller.
    Third-generation computers also featured operating systems, which allowed a machine to run a number of different programs
at the same time. Second-generation machines had only been able to work on one problem after another. In third-generation machines, the operating system acted as a central program that monitored and managed all operations of the computer. For the first time, computers were able to do multiple tasks simultaneously, which greatly increased