Star Trek - Hello Computer

Phil Jahner · 361.4K views · 2010-04-30 · 0:26

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Overview

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as a joke in threads about voice interfaces and talking to computers.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Film & TV clips GUI, HCI & interface history

What people said

antonvs · 2026-01 · Joke / meme
Star Trek illustrated the issue nicely in the scene where Scotty, who we should remember is an engineer, tries to talk to a computer mouse in the 20th century: [VIDEO]
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silverlake · 2022-11 · Joke / meme
I’m working on something similar. The target market is the 99% of people who want to program ad-hoc domain-specific problems. For example, generating charts w/o having to dig through all the data sources (Wolfram Alpha does a simple version of this). Building a financial risk model for a client’s specific request (you have to be a whiz at Excel, python or some internal ide). Even for home automation, my mom can’t use Alexa’s awful app to customize routines. I don’t think the voice part is necessary. It’s easy enough to slap ASR on the front. But going from natural language -> full problem spec -> code is hard in the general case, but doable in well-understood domains. Why can’t Scotty talk to a computer? ( [VIDEO] )
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jcadam · 2020-10 · Joke / meme
I may date myself here, but the first thing that popped into my head when I read the title of this post was this scene from ST IV: [VIDEO] It's kinda funny watching someone without a background in CS repeatedly ask google/alexa/siri a question in different ways that you know isn't going to elicit any kind of useful response.
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Sources

Video by Phil Jahner, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

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