Fascinating, Captain, fascinating.. as Spock might say of the smartphone today

I am obviously also a big fan of science fiction and have occasionally returned to famous themes from science fiction that have become fact, in my books and here with Alan on this blog. Our friend Faith McGary of Infonxx (which is now renamed and called KGB) the phone information providers ie 118118 in the UK etc, posted a funny comment at Forum Oxford last week, that had me thinking.

So, lets go back to the late 1960s. The first serious science fiction TV show is on the air in America, Star Trek (the original series). It ran three seasons only and was cancelled due to poor ratings (but has had a remarkably long career in reruns and syndication globally, ever since; not to mention spawning 4 follow-up TV series each longer than the original - rare for a spin-off to outlast the original - and also a lucrative movie franchise).

But yes, back to the 1960s. Star Trek popularized many science fiction concepts that are quite common today in most Sci Fi stories, from hyperspace drives allowing spaceships to travel faster than the speed of light, to teleportation, a handy way to move TV actors from the orbiting spaceship to the planet of the week down below, without very expensive special effects of shuttle crafts landing on the planet..

But yes, then there were the three standard gadgets that Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty would carry on their missions to the uncharted planets. They would typically carry three technologies, the phaser guns, the communicators, and usually only one of them - likely to be Spock - would carry the most complex portable gadget they had, the Tri-Corder.

I was always fascinated by that device. Three functionalities, it was the recorder-computer-scanner. And by scan, please don't limit yourself to thiking today's PC industry flatbed scanners, remember that the Star Trek ship had long distance scanner arrays - to scan planets for lifeforms, etc. So when thinking scannner, think camera, X-Ray etc. Not just flatbed scanner..

And this portable, not quite pocketable device was a combination of recording (cool), computing (very cool) and scanning (ultra-cool).

Lets put it in context of 1960s technology. The cassette tape recorder was just being invented by Philips. So most people who would have any kind of mechanical recorder, could only record voice, onto open reel tape recorders. The most portable ones at the time were the size of a small shoe-box. The Star Trek Tri-Corder was smaller than that.

In the 1960s there was no mass market video recording. The first home VCR would appear five years later launched by Philips in Europe, in a machine more expensive than the largest colour TVs and in size they were - I am having a hard time to imagine anything in modern life that is of the size of that first Philips VCR. Don't think of the oldest Betamax or VHS recorders, this was even bigger. The video cassette alone was a huge bulky thing as thick as 4 DVD cases..  now I know, a suit case! Yes, that first video recorder was literally the size of a small suitcase, you know the size, larger than a briefcase. The largest size small suitcase you can get onboard an airplane. THAT big. That was the first mass market video recorder in the summer of 1972, released in Europe a couple of years before Sony rolled out its Betamax in Japan and globally.

And this Star Trek Tri-Corder would do recordings. Not just voice but also video. And wait - that first Philips VCR has no camera, only the recorder part. The Star Trek Tri-Corder also included the sensor (scanner) to capture images and video. Wait a moment. There were no portable video cameras for us in the 1960s. Video cameras were enormous robot-like gadgets on heavy wheeled dollies, used only indoors in studios. The first ikegami and Sony and Panasonic shoulder-portable professional video cameras were starting to emerge in the 1970s, and cost - literally - a million dollars per unit.

Today pocketable video recording is nothing amazing, as any cheap cameraphone includes picture and video recording ability (well, most of them except the iPhone ha-ha). But in the 1960s, this was a "magical" invention. FAR beyond what was on the production line of any electronics maker. Remember there were no digital cameras. So 1960s camera technology was film based cameras, and a Polaroid was the best you could hope for in (near-)instant photography.

The Tri-Corder also had an enormous capacity to store information (recorder) as in memory and storage on a computer today. We didn't really see much the limits of how much of this capacity was assumed into the Star Trek device, but it was a lot.

Then the second ability, the computer. I was lucky to see a real computer in person when one of my relatives took me to see one, as an 11-year old. A real computer. It was enormous, filled two rooms. It was running, but there were no lights. It was processing a programme that would run all day and night. I was very disappointed that it was so silent and there was nothing exciting about it. Some big tape wheels would occasionally hum to action, roll a bit, and stop. Nothing else. And the room was chilly, as the air conditioning kept the room at very low temperature. This was 1971, still the time when computers were literally programmed using punch cards..  Oh, this was one of the most powerful computers in Finland at the time..

So, Star Trek was made years before this level, and a combination device had managed to squeeze a computer into that portable casing. Regular readers of our blog know that a modern mobile phone is a very advanced computer. To put it in context. The cheap mobile phone today is more powerful than the world's most powerful computer in the time of Star Trek. And more amazingly, any one standard smartphone today, is more powerful than - all the computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together..  If you have an N-Series or iPhone or Blackberry etc, in your pocket is more computing power than all computers of the world, in the 1960s, put together.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say..

Now to the last part, the scanner ability of the Tri-Corder. I mentioned video scanning and image scanning. Fine. Any cheap digital camera can do that. But also, the modern phone has a voice sensor. We can capture voices and real-time soundtracks to videos. Again for context, when outdoor film crews would shoot for TV shows in the 1960s, they had separate film cameras, and separate sound recorders. These were then merged in the studio later. It is not inherently obvious that sound and video go together in video recordings as they do today. 

Then the more amazing scanning abilities. The 2D Barcode reader, and the macro mode scanner. Did you know if you have a current high-end smartphone, like my Nokia N82 with its 5 megapixel camera resolution and macro mode, it can take sharp pictures of newspaper text, that can be read on the phone screen. Amazing..

And there are a bunch of other sensors and receivers, from the FM radio for entertainment and news, and GPS receiver for geographic positioning (obviously only on Planet Earth, ha-ha, not much use on another planet without a GPS satellite system in orbit). My N82 also has motion sensors (similar to an iPhone, if you tilt the phone, the image shifts from portrait mode to landscape, etc). And there are many communciation methods from Bluetooth and WiFi to all forms of cellular technolgoy and even infra-red transmission. There even are some software applications that let you convert a PDA or smartphone infra-red transmitter to send TV remote control signals, so you can change TV channels with your phone..

But yes, returning to Faith McGary's comments at Forum Oxford. Then we have the auto-focus sensor on the phone. To measure distance.. Yes, our smartphone has even a wireless tape measure built-in. How far to that alien, Mr Spock? Set phasers on stun, at my command...

Ha-ha, yes, it was not attempting to become a "scientific instrument" but our basic pocket phone is gaining more and more of those features that 40 years ago were very strictly impractical "far future" science fiction.

Fascinating, as Mr Spock would say.

The modern smartphone is not a complete Tri-Corder, it does not for example scan for various chemicals - although - these may be coming, from early experiments with some phones with the breath-analyzer or the pollution meter or the bad-breath warning etc - which are scanning for chemical compositions of gases.. But yes, Mr Spock would certainly approve. Our pocket device is potentially a very powerful scanning-computing-recording device. In only 40 years. Truly amazing..

PS - also there are many suppliers who provide various Tri-Corder related applications or even custom devices, to provide more accurately those functionalities of the TV series. But yes, from the Maxwell Smart shoe-phone to the Star Trek communicator form factor (ie copied in Motorola's StarTac flip phone in 1996) to James Bond's moving map in the car seen first in Goldfinger, we've seen a lot of that science fiction become fact. Now, what I really need is that Star Trek transporter to teleport me to my customers rather than taking those 12 hour flights...