Some interesting PDA/PADD thoughts from the great book:
The Computers of Star Trek
by: Lois Gersh & Robert Weinberg
1) Crewmembers on all of the starships carry PADDs (personal access display
devices), handheld computers that provide instant networking to the ship's
main computer core
2) In Starfleet being comfortable with computers isn't merely important or
even necessary: It's inseparable from being a functioning member of society
3) Starfleet members use the isolinear optical chips in tricorders and PADDs
for 'information transport'. The chips of the future are today's zip disks or
CDs. Sorting
through the information it seems to imply that the isolinear chips are used
for: RAM, hard drive space and data transfer.
4) The Enterprise computer core contains 2,048 dedicated modules and each
module contains 144 isolinear chips for a total of 294,912 chips. Each chip
contains 2.15 kiloquads of memory in standard holographic format.
5) What is a kiloquad? With kilo defined as one thousand, the meaningful part
of the term is quad (quadrillion) which is a thousand trillion (10 ^15
power). We can deduce that a kiloquad equals 1,000 quadrillion bytes. These
are in standard holographic format. Is this plausible? Lambertus Hesselink of
Stanford University predicts that holographic storage units will be the
memory of the future. He believes that a cube a centimeter on a side may
eventually store a terabyte of data.
6) A PADD has dimensions of 10x15x1 centimeter and a total memory capacity of
4.3 kiloquads (that is, 4.3 times the total information stored on Earth)
7) In theory, a crewmember using a PADD with the proper access codes could
navigate the starship from his quarters.
Cheers,
William
-- This is the Newtontalk mailinglist - http://www.newtontalk.net To unsubscribe or manage: visit the above link or mailto:newtontalk-request_at_newtontalk.net?Subject=unsubscribe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Jan 02 2002 - 12:00:57 EST