“Computer, search your memory banks for…”
Well holy shit if that isn’t now called the internet. I could never figure out how the ship’s computer was going to have all the universally known knowledge about a particular planet or villain. Now I know.
“Communicators” - Well, don’t we now have cell phones complete with the “flip-out” action.
“Lock onto his coordinates” - GPS. Got it.
“Put your phasers on stun” - OK. We have tasers. Damed close.
“Automatic doors” - We didn’t have those auto-sliding doors before Star Trek.
This was supposed to be 500 years in the future. We have a lot of these things 40 years later.
What else do we now have?
What else from Star Trek is on the horizon?
I can’t recall in which episode, but I once saw Chekov using a round, shiny disc that was very similar to today’s CD or DVD in a computer. Although one thing the writers of TOS apparently didn’t foresee was tapes becoming obsolete for all practical purposes.
As for positrons, yeah, they’re the basis for PET scans used in nuclear medicine imaging.
There was a history channel special about this that I’ve seen a few times. As I recall, one of the things that I hadn’t thought about was .mp3 files. Someone stated in an interview that he was inspired by scenes in ST:TNG where they’d just ask for a music piece and it was available. That was pretty cool I thought.