I know I need to attempt to research my question but I am at a loss. I don't know where to begin without taking a computer course when all I need is two or three lines of dialog
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Disclaimer: I am not a huge technogeek, so this may be only marginally useful input... but considering that the focus isn't the computers, unless you want to play the line for laughs, you might want to be careful about being *too* technobabbly, because (presumably), you'll want all readers to be able to grasp what's going on, technogeeks and technophobes alike.
I'm thinking here of a Doctor Who Ep (The Girl In The Fireplace, Season 2, if you want to look it up) where they stumble on a huge, abandoned spacecraft. To roughly quote the Doctor, "The warp drives are fully engaged,, full capacity?! There's enough power running through this ship to punch a hole in the universe... and we're not moving... so where's all that power gone?" That's really all the viewer "gets" in terms of technobabble - except, of course, that later in the ep we do find out where all that power is going (the ship has a bunch of time windows open, which opens up another opportunity for technobabble - The Doctor: "Must be a spaciotemporal hyperlink." Mickey: "What's that?" The Doctor: "No idea. Made it up. Didn't want to say 'Magic Door.'")
My point is, the more technologically oblique you go, the more likely you're going to have to include an explanation *anyway* (for the reader who *isn't* a technogeek), so unless what you're writing is *geared* toward technogeeks, you're probably going to have to strike a balance here and say something like, "The computer's are locked up - they must not be able to handle the data volume!"
Consider also that if the computers are locked up/frozen, the first officer is going to be *guessing* at why they're locked up/frozen, anyway, because... you know, the computers are locked up/frozen, so it's not like he can run diagnostics on them while they are indeed frozen. :)
I thought it was stupid that an Earth computer virus could attack an obviously superoir computer system that was not-Earth at all (and much more) as in "Independence Day." I do think however that as fast as science is moving, that hundreds of years in the future there could be a system that might be able to communicate with very different systems. Think of it as the flashing lights in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," that that is how the communication would happen...
That would be kind of like designing a language that could communicate with anybody. It's just not going to work right off the bat. Even if you could design a communication system that's both non-arbitrary and complex enough to convey a full range of meaning (two goals in opposition to each other), the chance that the aliens you encounter are using the same system is nil. They could possibly use your system's non-arbitrariness to decode it, but it would take some time.
Which gives a related idea to the one I suggested: Perhaps your tiny ship is trying to decode it.
This idea has been used in science fiction before, such as in Contact. (Not the computer crashing, but an alien civilization providing a sort of "translation key" based on scientific and mathematical facts.)
*Still* - when I completely hose my PC CPU trying to do some major number crunching, my iPhone doesn't stop working. When I run out of disk space because I'm creating a zillion files, the guy in the next office isn't at all affected... And if I fill up one of our large, general-access disks (can't ever remember the right terms!) I don't crash the phone system.
Most systems gate how fast they receive information, which is why everyone's pages load a different rates. Real-time systems have all sorts of features built in to handle too much data too fast, including just dropping information.
Essentially, I don't think there's a way to do anything that won't have computer engineers who are so inclined rolling our eyes. (You could be completely correct and we'd still roll our eyes.) Mostly we suspend disbelief and keep on going.
I think you've got a good handle on how to make this space-opera or SF-compliant, which is probably what really matters.
I'm thinking here of a Doctor Who Ep (The Girl In The Fireplace, Season 2, if you want to look it up) where they stumble on a huge, abandoned spacecraft. To roughly quote the Doctor, "The warp drives are fully engaged,, full capacity?! There's enough power running through this ship to punch a hole in the universe... and we're not moving... so where's all that power gone?" That's really all the viewer "gets" in terms of technobabble - except, of course, that later in the ep we do find out where all that power is going (the ship has a bunch of time windows open, which opens up another opportunity for technobabble - The Doctor: "Must be a spaciotemporal hyperlink." Mickey: "What's that?" The Doctor: "No idea. Made it up. Didn't want to say 'Magic Door.'")
My point is, the more technologically oblique you go, the more likely you're going to have to include an explanation *anyway* (for the reader who *isn't* a technogeek), so unless what you're writing is *geared* toward technogeeks, you're probably going to have to strike a balance here and say something like, "The computer's are locked up - they must not be able to handle the data volume!"
Consider also that if the computers are locked up/frozen, the first officer is going to be *guessing* at why they're locked up/frozen, anyway, because... you know, the computers are locked up/frozen, so it's not like he can run diagnostics on them while they are indeed frozen. :)
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This, really, is the best way to go, if you must have computers from different civilizations (I assume?) interacting at all.
This is actually as unlikely as an abacus talking to your toaster.
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Which gives a related idea to the one I suggested: Perhaps your tiny ship is trying to decode it.
This idea has been used in science fiction before, such as in Contact. (Not the computer crashing, but an alien civilization providing a sort of "translation key" based on scientific and mathematical facts.)
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Most systems gate how fast they receive information, which is why everyone's pages load a different rates. Real-time systems have all sorts of features built in to handle too much data too fast, including just dropping information.
Essentially, I don't think there's a way to do anything that won't have computer engineers who are so inclined rolling our eyes. (You could be completely correct and we'd still roll our eyes.) Mostly we suspend disbelief and keep on going.
I think you've got a good handle on how to make this space-opera or SF-compliant, which is probably what really matters.
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