add flash to the list!

I wonder if the inventor of the CD was influenced by this episode.

Thx for the comment, SteveGinIL.

That would be CD/DVD disks, although the functionality was not the same.

It showed up in an episode where they landed on a planet and found only an archivist. Everyone else had left, because the planet’s star was going to go nova (or some such disaster – it’s been a long time). The archivist was in a library of disks, and each disk, when inserted into a portal, would transport the person(s) to a particular time and planet. The entire population had abandoned the planet through this portal or a series like it.

I seem to recall it was the episode when Spock ended up on an ice planet and actually fell in love (but that may be mixing episodes). They needed to find out where he had been transported to, bring him back, and then clear out before the disaster struck.

The disks looked just like CDs – same size, same silver color.

I’ve always been amazed that they showed these about 15 years before CDs came along.

CDs’/DVD’s function is basically similar to the disks on TOS, since they stored data, and that they were inserted into a player/reader in a unit that processed the data.

I can’t quite remember the source I used for the Altair naming. May have been the television special “How William Shatner Changed the World.” I guess I should have fact checked the source and said “star system” instead of “galaxy.” I thought maybe Star Trek had called a galaxy by the name of Altair.

I know Wikipedia can’t be relied on, but it says that a Popular Electronics’ editor claimed that his daughter suggested the name from an episode of Star Trek. But the writer of the Wikipedia entry also feels that a more likely story is that the magazine editors came up with the name from the star.

As for a reasonable way for sliding doors to work in the real world, maybe the doors in deciding when to open could receive a transmission from the comm badges using the badge’s trajectory and proximity. And if for some reason you’re not wearing your comm badge, then you would have to resort to a voice command.

There are two conflicting stories about the naming of the Altair 8800. One is that the company owner’s 12-year-old daughter suggested it, the other was as an alternative to “Model PE-8″. While the daughter story has more of an “awww-cute” factor, the latter is more reasonable.

As early as the mid-1970s, Panasonic was selling a hand-held TV with a 1.5-inch monochrome CRT screen that was about the size of later VNS-C camcorders. One was shown on an episode of All In The Family”, which aired from 1971-1979.

Learning through the Internet is a great advancement. In the episode where Nomad wipes Uhura’s mind, seeing Uhura relearning in sickbay through the terminal access to the computer library was a glimpse of what the Internet would be like.

I wanted to let you know that the article was informative and supportive of the way technology has changed in the years since the airing of Star Trek and how we actually did have people who used ideas from the show and how it assisted in their inventive minds to work towards their goals.
Star Treks have given us some great impressions on what we would like in our futures from computer use to medical advancements.
One use that I use the internet for is the advancement in my education, attending classes on line with live seminars and interaction at the time of a seminar instead of a lecture.

Not really in widespread use yet, but shouldn’t be long!