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30 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2021 Feature Article by Dana Korf KORF CONSULTANCY LLC e original Star Trek series came into my life in 1966 as I was entering sixth grade. I was fascinated by the technology being used, such as communicators and phasers, and the crazy assortment of humans and aliens in each epi- sode. My favorite episode is "e Trouble with Tribbles," an episode combining cute Tribbles, science, and good/bad guys—sprinkled with sarcastic humor. During the second season I started my hobby of repairing and stripping tube TVs and radios in my bedroom for friends and family. ese events, along with Mr. Keller's electricity class I took years later as a senior in high school, started me on my path to becoming an electri- cal engineer. Did Star Trek subconsciously send me down this path? Who knows? But I have every epi- sode in my video library to this day. It showed us that anything was possible. Little did I know that my venture into electronics, PCB design, and manufacturing would reflect the story's premise. These Are the Voyages One of the first designs that I worked on was replacing a core memory board with those brand-new 16Kx1 dynamic RAM memories from that new startup Micron. For the younger readers, a core memory was composed of a round ferrite core with wires that ran in the X and Y axes with a diagonal wire through the center of the core. A current would run through the X-axis wire to create a "1" state, and the core would rotate until it hit the wires. A current would run through the Y-axis wire to rotate the core to create a "0." e diago- nal wire would put the bit into an indetermi- nate state. Every morning we would walk into the data center and power up our Data Gen- eral Nova computer by entering instructions with switches. You knew the system was run- ning when you could hear the cores making a 'The Trouble with Tribbles'