Space not so remote as Trekkies turn techies

NET RESULTS:It is no coincidence that many gadgets today look suspiciously like things from 'Star Trek'

LAST WEEK, a tweet went out noting that September 8th was the 45th anniversary of the first broadcast of a new television series called Star Trek.

How time flies, eh? You'd almost feel you were in episode 12 from the second season of the show – The Deadly Years– in which a landing party from the Enterprise ran into deadly radiation that causes them to hyper-accelerate into ancient, wrinkled oldies. (Thank goodness, a way to stop the radiation was found and everyone returned to their usefulness before fading into oblivion and ending the series prematurely.)

As a small child, I remember being a bit scared by that episode, and also another that I can now see (thanks to repositories of Star Trekinformation on the internet, an invention that could barely have been imagined back when the original series went on air) was actually the very first programme (after a pilot show). In this one, a woman arrives on board who seems to be an old girlfriend of Dr McCoy, but turns out to be a hideous creature with suckers that drain salt out of people's bodies.

I was fairly young, and wouldn’t have been an avid watcher of the series in its first incarnation during the 1960s, but I do remember the excitement of sometimes getting to watch it on someone’s colour TV when we still had a black and white set.

And I also remember being at a sleepover at a friend's house, where a flick through the channels after dinner produced an episode. I was thrilled we now had something exciting to watch, but was promptly told that my friend was not allowed to watch Star Trekbecause her parents thought it "too violent".

Too violent! What innocent days those were.

Yes, there were a few battles, and scary aliens too, but surely that Trouble with Tribblesepisode, in which the Enterprise gets overrun by affectionate, multicoloured creatures that looked like those hairy things you put over microphones to get rid of wind noise, is mitigating evidence against excessive Star Trekian violence.

It would be decades before I realised how much that show had sunk into the imagination of a generation. It's no coincidence that many of the technologies that we use and take for granted today look suspiciously like things that appeared in Star Trek.

The inventor of the original mobile phone in brick form, Martin Cooper of Motorola, is on record saying his inspiration came from Star Trek.

And it would be Motorola that directly and deliberately duplicated the Star Trekcommunicator design in the first clamshell "flip" phones.

Rob Haitani, a designer who worked for Palm, has said he based the design of the first Palm handheld user interfaces on the control panels on the bridge of the Enterprise. And, when Palm released the Treo mobile phone, he says they deliberately made the form factor echo the communicator, complete with a speaker phone so you could talk into it just like Captain Kirk.

When I interviewed some of the pioneers in computer speech recognition about a decade ago, I asked them what had compelled them to consider voice as a natural or perhaps even superior way of communicating with the computer. Every single one named one or the other (or both) of two inspirational sources: the original Star Trekseries, and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Both laptops and more recently, iPads can be found in vaguely prototype formats on the original Star Trekseries.

This short-lived original series (it only ran until 1969, with the last episode going out weeks before the moon landings) just keeps on fascinating viewers. Its later incarnations and spinoffs have brought in a new generation of viewers.

The Next Generationseries brought me back into Star Trekafter many years of not having given it a second thought. It turned out to be a pivotal father-daughter bonding experience too – one that regularly brought us together late in the evening in a kind of conspiratorial partnership after everyone else had gone to bed.

My dad, who loved science fiction yet never really embraced the original series, was a big fan of the Next Generationspinoff and could often be found watching it late at night in endless loops on various cable channels. A few instances of joining him just to be generally sociable soon turned me into a fan as well.

That series too, has been deeply influential for those who think about developing technologies. For example, the concept of the holodeck – the place where crew members could go to participate in 3-dimensional gameplay – has become a kind of holy grail in the future of game design. Intel research fellow Genevieve Bell talked about this kind of influence with me last week, noting that such fictional representations prepare us to perceive technologies in certain ways and to think of it as being most natural to certain formats.

So strong are such influences that she noted Intel has engaged a number of prominent science fiction writers to write about what technologies might be part of life 20 years from now.

What a great idea – recognising the (often unexpected) role that creative writers, and television and film producers can have in shaping our technologies and how we use them.