Picard had one in his ready room, and I'm pretty sure most crew had access to a desktop machine in their quarters but how powerful were these machines say compared to a PC of today? Does Trek have any information on those or can we guess?
How powerful were the desktop computers in TNG?
- Thread starter Candleicious Ghost
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Needs of the plot.
Most computers like that seem to be "terminals" connecting to the ship's main computer rather than stand-alone personal computers like we're used to today. That was also indicated by the set design, where they evolved from being pseudo-laptops to just screens that extended out from the desk to projected holograms.
On the other hand, just because they're terminals doesn't necessarily make them "dumb." A Chromebook is an example of a modern computer that's intended to work as a sort of terminal, with the majority of its programs and data on the internet rather than within the machine itself, and there are also cloud gaming services where games (or other programs) are run off of powerful centralized computers and the user's computer is just playing back a live video of what those servers are doing, but most Chromebooks would be ridiculously powerful compared to a high-grade professional PC from twenty years ago.
The computer in a commbadge can probably outperform any computer in existence today, even if the not-laptops in TNG mostly ran off the ship's main computer, they could probably still do a lot in isolation.
That's the best answer, but I was almost certain the TNG manual they made talks about these and what kind of computing power they had. Hell you could probably run GTA V on a personal PADD device in TNG if you wanted or the holodeck
They gotta fill those Tech Manuals with something,
Hey, they were still using floppy disks in The Menagerie. Remember Spock swapping them at that computer console? Good old 1.44s!!
Funnily enough, work began on developing the first floppy disk right after that episode aired.
Not floppy disks.
Tapes.
Long enough to hold 2.15 kiloquads.
Tapes.
Long enough to hold 2.15 kiloquads.
They could render CGI fish with incredible detail, suggesting they deployed the latest in Nvidia RTX-50 series tech.
Even an 8 inch floppy barely existed (or maybe didn't yet exist) when TOS was made. 1.44s in 3.5-inch hard plastic cases wouldn't come along for 2 decades after filming stopped. Those little plastic squares aren't meant to evoke floppy disks - they're, as noted by others, mean to be super-duper-advanced tapes.
Which, granted, a 1.44 floppy kind-of is. But if there's any through line in the design, it's geeks in the 80s trying to make the thing they saw on Star Trek, not the other way around.
I just discovered this through Amazon's Luna system. Now I can play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on my TV.
TAPE is an acronym. Many have been suggested but I prefer Transferable Archival Peripheral Enclosure. This has the advantage of working with the Micro prefix.
The problem that I have had, is the 'quad'. The problem is that memory capabilities during TOS, aren't really generated, Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon, came to the conclusion that a United States Library of Congress type capacity was absolutely required...
But tapes can be of any length, so it doesn't take much in the way of imagination to imagine a spiral circuit design that would simulate a tape.
But why a tape?
It is what we are stuck with. In the 1960s, tapes had the largest capacity available. But why? Because of how they were developed. Instead of one line of data, they have multiple lines of data. However they are sequential access only, as opposed to direct access. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Sequential systems by using multiple Tapes can simulate direct access systems, the more the merrier. But by properly indexing a direct access system a sequential system can be faked.
And, yes, they still make tape drives for backup.
So, using Last Unicorn Games Star Trek the Role Playing Game, as a base figure then each core of a Constitution class starship has 8,500 kiloquads of data, using relay logic.
In other words, "slow". But fast enough for a starship.
I would think the desktop terminals have minimal capacity, with all of them networked to the main ship computer.
I'm pretty sure they'd have their version of what we'd call a laptop or such
Actually, according to FJS's original Star Fleet Technical Manual, the technical term is "record deck," and the slot it goes into is a "record deck record/readout unit" (SFTM, TO:01:06:19, ff)
And at any rate, if Moore's Law continues to hold, we can assume that the desktop computers, tricorders, and PADDs of Picard's era, completely isolated, each individually have more memory and processing power than a ship's main computer of Kirk's era, or the combined total of all the computing hardware carried aboard an Archer-era ship.
Wow. I know we all jump through hoops to justify some of the oddness in our favourite shows, but that's Star Wars fan levels of hoop-jumping.
I agree that, based on current real-world capabilities, a TOS "tape" is probably not an actual reel of tape but some sort of solid-state device. But rather than some sort of awkward acronym, it's a lot simpler to just say that for whatever reason, in the 2260s the default slang for portable transferable memory is "tape." Why? who knows? Slang is weird. Why did North Americans truncate "automobile carriage" into "car" when Europeans went for "auto?" Why do Canadians wear bunnyhugs and toques whilst Americans wear hoodies and knit caps? We don't have to explain slang, just accept that it is slang.
This post is of course an opinion, but in my opinion, whoever came up with "tape is an acronym" was trying too hard.
I'd be very disappointed if the PADDs could only run GTA V. The ubiquity of processing power available today makes it possible to run Doom on
Have to admit that “tape as an acronym” is the sort of too-clever-by-half backronym I could imagine coming out of either an internal R&D bureaucracy in Starfleet (or if we take the lead of 80s tie-in media a particularly savvy Starfleet private contractor).
