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How Star Trek Artists Imagined the iPad... 23 Years Later
MorderVonAllem submitted an incredibly cool article about the computers and set design of Star Trek. If you are into that sort of thing, you're going to really like this one. It says "There are a lot of similarities between Apple's iPad and the mobile computing devices—known as PADDs—used in the Star Trek universe. Ars spoke to designers Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler to find out the thinking and inspiration behind the PADD and how closely the iPad represents a real-life incarnation of that dream."
I thought this was Slashdot: Source for technology related news with a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues
Not Apple HQ.
The PADDs similar tablets in general, not just Apples iPad.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I'd be willing to bet most of the engineers working on the iPad were Star Trek fans. Consciously or subconsciously, seeing how they were used on Star Trek inspired them. It's the same way cell phones operated a lot like communications. The Okudas should ask for royalty payments.
The article is wrong. i am almost dead certain that last PADD image comes from an early DS9 episode, where everyone gets aphasia and O'Brien tries to communicate with Bashir by writing.
FAIL!
I dunno, it seems to me the iPad and the PADD aren't particularly analogous. iPads are interactive application frameworks; PADDs were usually only used exactly the same way paper is - "look at this data from Omicron Persei 8!" *hands it over. *Reads. "My god. The borometric field is fluctuating!" You rarely saw data uploaded to a PADD and you never saw it running complex applications or interacting with the world; that's what Tricorders were for.
A PADD was a clipboard, just future-visioned. It served exactly the same purpose, plot-wise, as all the paper in the new Battlestar Galactica being octagonal - it show you you were in a different world.
When I can casually toss it onto my desk like Picard without worrying about the thing shattering, it will have officially replaced books.
The iPad is EXACTLY what the PADD would have been had the Ferengi designed it instead of someone in the Federation.
I think the really interesting thing here is that some big and well funded companies have been trying to sell tablet computers for over a decade, yet never made the same decision concerning the form factor that was obvious to a art director for a TV show twenty years ago. Basically that a computing device accessed via a touchscreen should have an interface specifically designed to be operated via a touchscreen. That is the big difference between the iPad and the tablets that came before it. And also one of the big differences between the PADD and most of the tablets we've seen in the real world.
And I'd argue that it's not necessarily the job of computer scientists to make computing more friendly. They should be working on making software more efficient and powerful. Interface designers should be the ones worrying about making it more friendly. There is of course overlap and cross-communication between the two disciplines, but interface design is important enough that people should dedicate their work specifically to it.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The only things an iPad (or iPhone/iPod touch) has more in common with PADD's are ... touch sensitive screens
The ONLY thing?
That turns out to be EVERYTHING.
As for the article, one of the reasons a lot of people like the iPad is that it's Stark Trek UI brought to life. I can't help be repeat the quote from Penny Arcade here:
I have been waiting for the ability to manipulate technology by pressing dynamic symbols for basically ever. If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses. Get with the fucking program. Come and touch the neon glyphs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now, on topic, I actually can't help but wonder how much (not if) they copied from ST
As was pointed out, the very name was from Star Trek... actually I'm amazed that connection was not made more commercially, but perhaps that would have meant a large battle with the Star Trek lawyers.
The actual elements though, I think that it follows someone seriously thinking about use of the thing and logical layouts as set designers did years ago, would hit on similar conventions to someone building the device in practice.
But, many of those that have "all that sneer" are still going to be creating the actual tech that everyone else uses.
It seems that way now but long term I'm not sure how true that will be.
I mean, I'm not doing assembly anymore...
However the death of textual interfaces has long been predicted and I still use a bash shell heavily every day, so I'm not willing to commit 100% to that as THE future.
The thing of it is, that those sneering aren't the ones who are going to be creating for the new tech because they have no respect for it. Most developers have embraced touch screen interfaces a this point, I would not claim they are "sneering" any longer. They just see it as one aspect of computing but (as you do) the other aspects will remain. I think they will remain but it is question of degree to which that is true. The future may be more like the past, where once only geeks really had "computers" (like Sun workstations and CAD stations and the like) and the rest of the world has computing devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To be fair, if the ship self-destructed while people still had files open for writing, or other half-finished unrollbackable transactions, there could be some data loss/corruption.
That would be a good plot. Captain orders destruct, but computer refuses to obey until everyone saves their work. The captain goes around the ship, making people exit their apps, and in the course of doing that, he happens to solve the problem that made him want to destruct in the first place. ("Mr. Worf, I need you to exit Filemaker. Wait, you're not Mr. Worf. Security, I've found the intruder!!") He wants to call off the destruct, but the process doesn't answer; it's unkillable and waiting for one last user to close his files. So from then on, that user has to keep that app running all the time, or else the ship will explode.
Next season there's an episode where that user's workstation is under virus attack ("Lt. Barklay, I told you to stop saving other people's holodeck sessions to your flash drive and taking the back to your workstation to watch! 'This session requires an advanced holodeck playback CODEC' and you believed that?"), and they finally manage to migrate the app-which-is-holding-open-the-file into some VM where it's put to sleep forever (alongside Dr. Moriarty).
Forever, that is, until the next episode about the several-year-old unabortable destruct order, and the one open file that keeps it from running.
LaForge: "Captain! I just tested my backups for the first time in two years and it turns out we don't have backups for anything that comes after that always-open file in the directory!"
Riker: "We're going to have to re-order the directory."
LaForge: "But commander, it's a hash table!"
Picard: "Data, I need you to rename all our files so that their hash values come before 0xdeadbeef. Then we'll softlink the old filenames to the new ones."
LaForge: "And you expect me to maintain this system for how much longer?"
Riker: "Maybe we ought to let the self-destruct finish."
Picard: "Number one, I think you're on to something."
Riker: "Captain, I was jo--"
Picard: "Data, can you write an emulator for the self-destruct hardware?"
Data: "No, the Ferengi don't allow emulators." (ZING! Apple, did you think I forgot about you? This all started as a flame, you know.)
And on and on and on., good grief it would never have to end.
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