The Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh Read Free Book Online

how the chips represent many advances over the earlier “crystal memory cards.” This sentence implies RAM. Because Trek people use the isolinear optical chips in tricorders and personal access display devices (PADDs) for “information transport,” it sounds as if the chips are the future version of today’s floppy disks, zip disks, or CDs. A footnote in the Technical Manual states that the isolinear optical chips reflect “the original ‘microtape’ data cartridges used in the original series.” Which also implies that the chips are descendants of floppies or zips or Jazz disks.

    FIGURE 2.5 Core Memory

    Sorting through the technobabble, we’re forced to conclude that isolinear optical chips are used for RAM (the references to core memory), hard drive space, and data transfer (the references to floppies, the PADDs, etc). If pushed, we shrug and say that isolinear optical chips are used for everything. Each chip is a nanoprocessor with associated memory, and each chip also serves as a disk drive. Of course, each chip includes all required input/output and memory buses. Sure. And LaForge and O’Brien crawl through a Jeffries tube with socket wrenches whenever one of these chips needs fixing.
    Our future will be with invisible nanotech computers. These computers will incorporate processing functions, memory, and storage space. They may do everything, just as the isolinear chips supposedly do everything. But in reality, our chips will be interconnected in a widely distributed network of processors and storage media. There will be no need to store massive amounts of information in any one location.
    Each computer core contains 2,048 dedicated modules, and each module contains 144 isolinear optical storage chips, making a total of 294,912 chips. Each chip contains 2.15 kiloquads of memory in standard holographic format, according to the Technical Manual . Multiplying our two numbers together, we determine that the Enterprise has a total memory storage capacity of 634,060 kiloquads. This number happens to correspond very closely to the 630,000 kiloquads supposedly in each memory module.
    At this point, it appears that there’s a slight flaw in the manual. Either the total capacity of each module is approximately 630,000
kiloquads, f or with 2.15 kiloquads per chip, the total ship capacity is 630,000 kiloquads. For simplicity, let’s assume the latter.
    So what’s a kiloquad? We don’t know. The designers of Star Trek dare not jump on a limb and try to define it. According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia , “No, we don’t know how many bytes are in a kiloquad. We don’t even want to know. The reason the term was invented was specifically to avoid describing the data capacity of Star Trek’s computers in 20th century terms.” 6
    The series’ writers feared defining the kiloquad too closely for obvious reasons: people might calculate whether the ship’s computers were adequate to do all the fantastic things the writers were making them do. However, that hasn’t stopped Star Trek fans from trying to figure out the size of a kiloquad, and being fans ourselves, we’ll play the same game.
    With kilo defined as one thousand, the meaningful part of the term is quad. Checking a dictionary reveals that the only numerical term involving quad is quadrillion, which is defined as a thousand trillion (10 15 ). Thus, it’s easy enough to deduce (as have many other Trekkers) that a kiloquad equals 1,000 quadrillion bytes. Breaking it down further, a kiloquad’s the same as a million trillion bytes (10 18 bytes).
    As first seen in the original series episode “The Naked Now,” isolinear optical chips are approximately the size of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. We’ll use that standard for our model. In the Star Trek universe, an isolinear optical storage chip, approximately the size of a 3.5-inch floppy disk, contains 2.15 kiloquads of memory,