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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

Our computers use bits, wich are composed of two digits: 0 and 1

Star Trek computers use quads. With a little logic, a quad could be composed of four digits: 0,1,2 and 3.

Is this canon info? If so, what the heck is the advantage of having four digits?

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Posted by Identity Crisis (Member # 67) on :

I don't think it's canon info at all.
Trek computers measure memory in kiloquads. If a quad was as you define then 1 kiloquad would be able to store as much data as 15 bytes! Rather silly.

All the evidence points towards Trek computers still being binary in operation.

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

Well, it sounded cool, anyways. Look, this is the first post with my status line!

Posted by Gaseous Anomaly (Member # 114) on :

What about Janeway's reference to "trinary logic" in 'Hope and Fear'?

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Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :

Trek computers are not binary. Kim said in "Future's End" that it would take him a few moments to convert to "their old binary system". That said, the ep with the Binars seemed to suggest the Trek computers were still binary. And a "quad" (both kilo and giga) was just a made up unit first used with Data's storage capacity to suggest a very big unit without relating it to anything used today.

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Posted by Michael Dracon (Member # 4) on :

Trinary computers have a 'Yes', 'No' and a 'Maybe'. (according to White Wolf's Roleplaying game: "Mage", in this case the Technomage part).

Trinary syntax was indeed mentioned in the Voyager episode 'Hope and Fear'.

In real life: The term 'quads' was created to avoid the possibility that real computers were going to exceed the capacity of Treks computers. So they needed a none existent means of measuring the amount of data.
Although Riker did mention 'bytes' in the episode with the Bynars.

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[This message has been edited by Altair (edited March 30, 2000).]

Posted by Elim Garak (Member # 14) on :

The Voth stated in "Distant Origin" that Voyager had a "simple binary computer system" or something like that.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Was that the ep? I know there was one where a couple people beam into a corridor on Voyager and scan a computer terminal, saying that it's binary...

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

TSN: It was "Distant Origin".

I notice that the computer technology is among the least consistent in Star Trek.

A two-state (=binary) logic is the only "logical" choice for any data storage. The smallest possible device would be a single atom that can have an excited and a basic state. This is already possible today, at least in very basic experiments, for instance quantum tunneling microscopy. Of course, one could argue that different electrons in an atom can occupy different states, maybe with a "Heisenberg compensator" Trek computers could distinguish more states, but the storage device would be much more complicated.

A three-state logic maybe useful in some data transfer (pulse modulation) techniques, in order to keep the mean value (over time) of an arbitrary signal zero. However, I don't believe this is the case in Starfleet's ODN.

There is nothing like an "old" or "new" binary system. If there is a problem of converting data, it's either an analog issue of signal levels or a matter of data decryption, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the digital system.

And now for the worst problem, the quads. The TNG people were wise to introduce this obscure unit. In 1987, a 1 gigabyte volume of the E-D computer would have been astonishing, nowadays it's ridiculous. Nevertheless, the quad figures are rising exponentially. The small isolinear chips store some kiloquads, the Enterprise-D data always counted in megaquads, Voyager needs gigaquads or even teraquads. The Galaxy was and is pretty much advanced, but has only a small fraction of the storage capacity of the Intrepid? I can't believe that.

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Posted by Michael Dracon (Member # 4) on :

The most worst mistake on Voyager on this subject:

They recovered teraquads of information from the Mars orbitter.

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

Janeway said in "One Small Step": "We recovered over 60 TERAQUADS of information from Ares 4"
Now, that's ridiculous! The only device used by 7 of 9 was a tricorder. So that means, one VOY-tricorder can store over 60 Tq! Another poosibility is that the tricorder just send data directley to the Delta Flyer, although 60 Tq for the DeltaFlyer is still nonsense.

Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :

Didn't Data once say his memory capacity was so-and-so many quadrillion bits? Could Quad simply equal quadrillion?

That'd make a TeraQuad would be a Trillion Quadrillion bits?

10 to the 12th to the 15th? That's a LOT of information...

So that's probably wrong. And more unlikely that the Ares had that much memory.

Er. if the Tricorder was simply acting as a relay and uplink conduit, it wouldn't need to have all that much memory capacity, would it?

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

No, the tricorder wouldn't have needed that capacity in the latter case. But the Delta Flyer would have needed it. 60 Tq+ is still too many for a mere shuttle! (Borg tech??)

Posted by nx001a (Member # 291) on :

It might be possible to store that much data in a tricorder. Look how hard drives have changed in the last decade. They are getting smaller and with a higher storage capacity. Now a modern PC has 10 gb and this figure is going higher. In 400 years time the amount stored will be huge.

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

Yes, but it doesn't make sense in Trek-terms. The amount of storage on the Enterprise is still measured in Kiloquads, while a tricorder in VOY can hold 60 TERAquads

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Well, the idea of the DF holding 60Tq is a bit much, but VOY's jump to giga- and teraquads from TNG's kiloquads isn't entirely bad. Bear in mind that the E-D had simple isolinear chips, while Voyager has bio-neural circuitry.

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :

And we've seen what ten years of advancement in data storage can do in the real world.

On the other hand, there really hasn't been a great leap in computer technology, at least not visibly. On the gripping hand, once computers pass a certain point, will we even notice their improvement anymore?

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Posted by nx001a (Member # 291) on :

Thats true about performance but the problem is only about the increasing size of computer storage but the way that data is stored. With such a large computer core in voyager a good database management system is needed just to store and keep track of the information. Imagine the Operating System that voyager would be using to run its hardware. Hopefully, it is not windows based.

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :

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Posted by nx001a (Member # 291) on :

You have performed an illegal operation.

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Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :

If a quad was a quadrillion bits, that would put one around 110 terrabytes. That's over 80 million floppy diskettes. Over one million zip disks. Over 6,000 DVDs. Or 46 of those nifty new credit-card sized devices that'll be coming out in a few years. So with our best data storage, 60 TQ would need the space taken up by 3 quadrillion credit cards. That's 1.7 ex 13 cubic meters. That's enough to make a cube 26 kilometers on a side. I'm estimating that's enough to cover the land surface of the earth with a layer four inches deep.

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Well, bear in mind that a bit is pretty standard, since it's a binary digit. A byte, however, was decided to be eight bits so as to accomodate a sufficient number of characters (256) while not taking up too much memory (we could've had ten-bit bytes or twelve-bit bytes, or whetever, but they would take up extra space, and the extra characters it would provide aren't really necessary).

Now, if Trek uses larger "bytes" (if they use more bits to store a single character), then they would need more storage space to hold things. Say they use sixteen-bit characters. What would be a simple 50k file for us, would actually take up twice as much space on a Trek computer. So, to put it another way, however much bigger a Tek character is than our bytes, they need that many times more space to hold it. If they use sixteen-bit characters, a DVD would only hold half what we can fit on it. The information would be twice as detailed, but there wouldn't be as much of it. If their "bytes" are even larger, this is even more evident.

So one can see why such large storage capacities could be necessary.

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

Theory: 1 quad = 1 quadrillion bits (or bytes, doesn't make much of a difference)

1 Teraquad would be 10^15*10^12=10^27 bits. Asssuming that it were possible to use single-atom storage devices, then a silicon device (density: 10^21 cm^-3) would require a volume of 10^6 cm^3 = 1 cubic meter. Not a convenient size for a tricorder.