Computer Power Since Star Trek: TNG

My wife and I were watching a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "Booby Trap" (ep6, s3) when something interesting happened in the story. The Enterprise was stuck in an asteroid field. They needed to get out before their power drained, killing them all. Geordi came up with a plan that required making thousands of propulsion adjustments per second, but the captain was concerned by turning over control to the ship's computer. Suddenly the story felt rather dated. Despite the copious amounts of techno babble, this plot-point felt out of place. I decided to remind myself what technology was like in 1989.

Star Trek: TNG - computers

By the late 80's most vehicles had been using some sort of electronics for a while, but that was considered somewhat unreliable compared to their primary [mechanical] functions, and not much was computer controlled. I think this is where the paranoia in this episode stems from. Computers were fun, but in life and death situations manual controls were preferred...

If you're wondering how fast computers were in 1989, well... let's keep this simple and say how much faster the one in your pocket probably is:

• 10 times the screen resolution

• 2,500 times faster processing

• 16,000 times as much RAM

• 25,000 times as much storage

• 1,000,000 times more graphical processing

• 3,000,000 times faster modem (also wireless)

All this while costing about 1/25th, weighing less than 1/100th as much and running from an internal battery. Your water and dustproof phone also probably has a touch sensitive, high refresh-rate, HDR, OLED screen, multiple: cameras, microphones, speakers, wireless radios, temperature sensors, GPS locators, a wirelessly chargeable and/or fast charging battery and lots more...

Picard with a tablet

It's easy to feel like technology is stagnating these days, so it's fun to look back 36 years at what we had, then realize what we have now would have blown people's minds in 1989... That said, TNG did have tablets (see above)...

The line in the show that sparked off this thought does still feel out of place, however. "Doesn't the computer do most of the hard work for you?" I wondered. Surely it's not much of a stretch to "trust" the computer when you have a holodeck that perfectly recreates historical scenes from a short prompt. You transport people from orbit by dematerializing their atoms, beaming them to the surface of a planet and re-materializing them again... what do you think does that?

Data's USB connection

Fun Fact: In the show, Data is said to operate at around 60 Teraflops and have about 100 Petabytes of storage. That's a good amount of storage, but a graphics card from 2022 had faster processing. We probably need to upgrade that a bit for 2366...