“Beam Me Up Scotty”
By Steve Hill
My Daughter, Vicky, is in the final year of here university course, Digital Art and Technology, and as part of her dissertation on the “Wants and Needs of Mobile Phones” she is dealing with the history of mobile communication.
I was talking to her about this particular section and as we talked I mentioned how things had changed over a relatively few years and science fiction was now fact.
This conversation coincided with our viewing of the classic 80s movie Back To The Future - which ends up with Doc Brown returning from 2015 with a flying car and some sort of domestic nuclear power source on the back of his Delorean!
His clothes were strange enough and of course Back To The Future 2 furthers these views of a future very different to the 80s and now only five years away.
As is so often the case, these predictions of the future are very far off the mark - but one area where they didn’t seem to see the changes to come was in personal communications - particularly the mobile, cell or smart phone.
Vicky and I had been discussing Star Trek, now Vicky has never really known a time without a mobile phone, normally glued to here hand - even while she sleeps, but when I stated that in the first Star Trek series James T Kirk’s communicator was an amazing 23rd century piece of technology it seemed laughable.
When I look at my iPhone I am amazed that it does far more than Kirk’s communicator, though I doubt it would work on some far off planet - but I don’t know, possibly with the spread of cell masts in recent years!
The Star Trek communicator actually inspired some of the flip phones of a few years ago - but we are way beyond that now - we seem to have already boldly gone where no man has gone before.
It is the same working at Enigin - to see the advancements and the technology and software being developed and adapted to help energy saving and efficiency, it is a little like living in a sci-fi world!
At least in one area of Geekdom the world is already beyond science fiction - all we need now is that transporter, flying car, domestic power generation looking like a blender, robots doing everything and so on….
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