The Computers of Star Trek Read Online Free

that’s used to etch circuits on silicon chips. Light beams imprint etching patterns into the silicon, and then gases carve the circuitry according to the patterns. So the circuit can’t be narrower than the wavelength of light.
    Mercury light beams, for example, are as tiny as one-half or one-third of a micron (one millionth of a meter). Light beams from a pulsed excimer laser may someday etch circuits with wavelengths of one-fifth of a micron.
    But, and it’s a big but, we can’t reduce silicon circuits below one-tenth of a micron. At that size, quantum mechanics kick in and make the circuitry undependable. New techniques are essential.
    It’s long been postulated that gallium arsenide will replace silicon as the substrate for chips. (A substrate is a “backbone” supporting the circuits.) This new technology will help a little, but it won’t get us to the world of Star Trek: optical isolinear circuitry that breaks the laws of the universe! How far-fetched then is a computer that operates on nothing more than beams of light?
    Eight years ago, Bell Labs created an optical transistor, called the Symmetric Self-Electro-Optic Effect, a name that could be straight out of Star Trek . Optics are becoming fundamental to computers today. Hence the notions of Star Trek’s optical data network and optical isolinear chips—central pieces of the architecture of the Enterprise computer that we’ll describe in the next chapter—are extensions of what exists in our own world.
    Basically, an optical computer has a filter that either blocks light or lets it through. When the filter lets light through, we have
a binary one. Otherwise we have a binary zero. We split a laser beam, putting information on one of the two “strands.” Then we cross the strands, forming light patterns at the juncture. If we cross the strands at various angles and in different sections of the holographic crystal structure, we can store tons of information: literally thousands of pages of data. To read the data, we shine a laser through the holographic structure. This “reading” laser produces another light beam that displays a holographic image of the stored information.
    It’s thought that holographic structures will someday store hundreds of billions of bytes. This method alone makes the vast storage capacity of the Enterprise seem possible. But with holographic storage, we won’t need the hard drives of mega-monster computers. We’ll need only a tiny holographic crystal structure. Lambertus Hesselink, a computer scientist at Stanford University and chairman of the holographic research firm Optitek, believes that one holographic structure the size of a sugar cube may be able to hold a terabyte of data. With continued refinement of the holographic process, in several decades that same sugar cube will someday hold as much information as every computer in the entire world does today. 1
    Current thinking is that the merging of optical computers with holographic methods will yield the next major computer revolution.
    Amazing! And straight out of Star Trek .

2
    A Twenty-Fourth-Century Mainframe
    The computer revolution today is a little more than a half-century old. The microprocessor has been in use for only a few decades. Yet in these few decades the computer has changed radically, from a fragile, room-sized agglomeration of vacuum tubes to a tiny chip embedded in automobile dashboards, wristwatches, and even greeting cards. It’s also become embedded in our lives. What computers are and how we relate to them has changed just as radically as their physical form.
    This has happened in just a generation; what will computers be like in 300 years?
    Three hundred years is a long time from now. If we really want to visualize the future, we need to shake ourselves loose of the assumptions of today.
    With that thought in mind, let’s examine the most important component of any Star Trek