Like many of you, I was saddened to hear the news of Leonard Nimoy’s death. His Star Trek character Mr. Spock was an inspiration to many of us who entered technical fields.
Although Spock was the science officer on the USS Enterprise, not the chief engineer, he was often the one who solved problems and was often called in to help Mr. Scott out of a jam. Even so, Spock was, in many ways, an electrical engineer. How often did we see him use electronic technology that was not only primitive to him, but is now primitive to us? How was it that Spock could solve problems by building circuits with vacuum tubes designed centuries before his time, as he did “In this zinc-plated, vacuum-tubed culture” in The City on the Edge of Forever? In fact, how could Spock even build a memory interface with tubes? They can't possibly switch fast enough? But, that's the beauty of science fiction.
Read the full article, including pictures of Boston's West End (where Mr. Nimoy grew up) as is looks today, at EDN.
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