• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

William Shatner explains microchips

JoeZhang

Vice Admiral
Admiral
Back in 1976, microprocessors had a maximum of 8.5K transistors for 64bits of memory. The Queen of England sent her first email, and Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I.
And a post-Star Trek but pre-TJ Hooker William Shatner made this film for AT&T about the future of microprocessors.

The chips were tiny at that time, to be sure, but paltry in terms of memory by today's standards. Yet Moore's Law had already been in effect for 11 years by this point, enough time to see that the future was going to be full of miniscule, powerful machines, even they weren't the predicted picturephones. Today's "microworld" is still getting smaller all the time.

This version of the film was slightly revised in 1980.

http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2011/3/11/AT&T-Archives-Microworld
 
Hehe.. this makes my IBM XT look modern again with its 8088 CPU containing 29.000 transistors, running at a staggering 4.77Mhz, its 640 Kb RAM, the state of the art 360Kb Floppy drive and its massive MFM harddrive of 20 Megabytes!:cool:
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top