As ubiquitous as Star Trek is—spawning so many spin-offs and movies that only a true Trekkie could list them all off the top of their head—it’s a fun bit of trivia that the original series (known as “TOS” to fans) ran only three seasons on NBC. The first episode aired in the United States on Sept. 8, 1966, launching an iconic brand and truly going “where no man has gone before,” both in terms of entertainment history and technology. Explore more in this edition of Tech Time Warp, where the past meets the future.
Futuristic fiction turned everyday tech
Indeed, several of the tech gadgets featured in the original series as works of fiction now resemble commonplace items:
- Whether you call them “Personal Access Display Devices” or data slates, the portable flat-screen computers carried on the starship Enterprise are not wholly dissimilar from the tablets of today. (Is there a connection between PADDs and iPads?)
- Captain Kirk was able to interact with his computer via voice command, not unlike Alexa- and Siri-enabled devices. The TOS computer was voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, wife of show creator Gene Roddenberry. Barrett-Roddenberry continued to provide the voice of Starfleet computers until her passing in 2008.
- Motorola’s Martin Cooper, who led the team that developed the first cell phone and himself placed the first cell phone call in 1973, has repeatedly cited Star Trek’s communicators as his inspiration. While the first portable phone was gigantic, Motorola’s StarTAC (see what they did there?), released in 1996, was a flip phone just like the communicator.
Whether the replicator bears any relation to the 3D printers of today is a subject of some debate. To explore more of at Star Trek’s prescient tech, head to YouTube, where you’ll find multiple videos on the topic.
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