I wrote this for a final presentation in 2006 for Boston University’s MET CS 770: Object Oriented Analysis and Design class, under professor Suresh Kalathur. The objective was to model a “real world” system in software.
Deciding what to model was a challenge. An elevator system was tempting. And then, based on my nearly-compulsive reading of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual by Michael Okuda and Rick Sternbach, I realized Star Trek’s transporter system would be ideal. I was still thinking about how to demonstrate the model, when my coworker Ravi Gopalan suggested I look at Adobe Flex.
I was nearly instantly hooked with what Flex could do, running inside the Flash Player (the very thing that would doom Flex not many years later). With it, I could create a beautiful, interactive display that would have been painful (but not entirely impossible) to create in the Web browsers of 2006. I sank 40 hours (5 to 10 times what was needed) into the project, and even had my kids, dressed in Star Trek uniforms, enter the room at the end of my presentation saying I had beamed them into the wrong room.
And, for reasons that are fair and just, Flex died. No one wanted a horrifically insecure Web plugin, and browsers got truly standardized and more powerful. I kept my archive, and swore that someday I would get around to converting it to modern HTML5 or whatever was the standard when I did it.
Twenty years later (19 years, 51 weeks, and 1 day), I took a few minutes in a company-sponsored hackathon to have Claude Opus 5 do what I had never gotten around to. To my delight, with a tinge of horror, it took only minutes, most of which was spent on the Node build and testing, to get a perfect translation on the very first pass. I spent a few more hours tweaking, fixing some minor pre-existing bugs, and adding a few effects and features I had never gotten around to. (Software is never finished, just abandoned.)
Like Q at the end of “Deja Q,” (TNG s3:e13), “Heeeeeeeeeee’s back!”
—Doug Wilcox, November 2026 (Veracode Hackathon 28: Page Break)
Engage.
