Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) gleefully announced on Monday that it has been working with Paramount over the last few months to “develop three conceptual technologies” for Star Trek Beyond, the latest in the new Star Trek movies.
In an HPE press release, the company writes: “Without giving any spoiler alerts [editor's note: I think you simply mean "spoilers" here, HPE], we collaborated on three different technological concepts in the film: The quarantine, the diagnostic wrap, and the book. Each of these concepts showcase HPE’s vision for the future of technology, but are rooted in developments we hope to introduce much sooner.”
That futuristic technology that HPE is promising “much sooner” is related to a product called “The Machine,” which a larger, less-fractured HP promised in 2014. The Machine would use memristors (technology theorized in the ‘70s and built in 2008 by HP to employ flexible electrical resistance as memory) as well as optical interconnects to create a new genre of hardware that was supposed to revolutionize supercomputers and mobile devices alike. The company was sufficiently gung-ho about its R&D to claim in 2014 that it would commercialize the technology in The Machine within the next few years “or fall on its face trying.”
HP seems to be making good on the “falling on its face” part. A few months after teasing The Machine, HP split into two companies: HPE to focus on selling servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc, to focus on selling PCs and printers. The fallout from that split decimated more than 30,000 jobs.
One year later, HP announced that The Machine would be released as a "memory-driven architecture" alone, scrapping the custom-built OS HP said it would create to work in step with the memristor and silicon-to-optic interfaces promised in the original The Machine. Instead the new The Machine would just run a version of Linux, according to ExtremeTech.
And then just last month, HPE announced it would split again, spinning its IT services business off into another company.
But incredibly, HPE isn’t taking a step back from its 2014 claims that it's going to bring unprecedented changes to computing. “The Machine is poised to leave behind sixty years of technological compromises and inefficiencies, reinventing the fundamental architecture on which all computing is currently based,” the company wrote today.
“This new technology would no doubt seem like science fiction to the first computer pioneers of the 1950’s,” HPE wrote. “And, even today, the possibilities seem beyond comprehension.” (You said it, HPE, we didn’t.)
“As you can imagine, this gave HPE and Star Trek Beyond production teams plenty of creative runway for the film.” Some might even say that HPE has been spinning its wheels on that same creative runway since 2014.
HPE says it's projecting the promise of The Machine 250 years into the future, leaning on the Star Trek franchise's geek clout in the company's new ad campaign. Although we know little about how the imagined technology from The Machine will feature in Star Trek Beyond, we can bet there will be some subtle or not-so-subtle product placement for the struggling company in the upcoming movie.
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