Like many engineers in my circle, my formative years were spent watching Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), which premiered in 1966 and starred William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Each episode was introduced by Kirk saying: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To boldly go behind the beyond, behind which no man has boldly gone behind, beyond, before” (or words to that effect).
As an aside, a variation of the phrase “where no man has gone before,” is “by oceans where none had ventured.” This was first used by the noted Portuguese poet Luís de Camões in his epic poem The Lusiads, which was published in 1572 (good luck finding tidbits of trivia like this in other, lesser electronics magazines).
Much of the technology that appeared in Star Trek TOS was literally the stuff of science fiction. The communicators inspired the world’s first flip phone, Motorola’s StarTAC, which debuted 30 years later in 1996. With respect to tricorders, we now have sensors that can detect a human heartbeat through a wall and materials sensors that can detect unwanted items in a plate of food (peanuts, shellfish, botulism, salmonella…).
Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), which premiered in 1987, introduced us to concepts like tablet computers in the form of the Personal Access Display Device (PADD). The first iPad was introduced 23 years later in 2010. Just one year later, an app became available to make the iPad look and act like a PADD (I couldn’t make this stuff up).
As the ancient Roman poet Virgil famously said, “Fortune favors the bold.” Many of today’s technologies were the result of bold decisions by their creators. Whatever bold decisions are around the technology corner, the team at DENA stands ready to tell you all about them.