How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

Quite self congratulatory, but with interesting insight. I’ve been wondering how much sci-fi, especially of the seventies televised kind, has influenced computer interfaces and technologies. My general dislike of Star Trek is mostly due to the “technology will fix everything” stance I believe kids got out of the show.

Still, the show’s designers apparently strived for better usability:

“One thing that informed not just the PADD, but the overall technology, was that Gene Roddenberry wanted the new Enterprise to be visibly more advanced then the original Enterprise,“ Okuda said. "Roddenberry had the wisdom to realize that ‘advanced’ didn’t mean 'more complicated.’ He actually wanted things to be much simpler. So we took that to mean that it was cleaner, better user interfaces, fewer buttons, fewer things to learn how to operate,” he told Ars.

That’s another question I’ve been asking myself. Is there any science-fiction universe in which the new technology is actually complicated to use? It always seems like future computers work easily and flawlessly, whether they’re actually more simple than ours, or the users are more competent at using them. I’d like to see an anticipated technology that’s complicated and broken the way computers are today1.

Can you tell I’ve spent most of the morning installing a network printer on a coworker’s PC? ↩︎