QWERTY keyboards in Trek?
alie...@gmail.com
thread about past/present/future handheld gizmos and the question of
data entry has come up, specifically that there is no keyboard on a
Tricorder. I noted that an obvious alternative would be Palm's
Graffiti, except that it hasn't caught on now and likely won't in the
future.
OTOH Trek seems to lean toward a post-Apocalyptic scenario what with
the Eugenics Wars, WWIII, and so on, so maybe typewriter-style
keyboard skills just died out along with the majority of users of
same. Hence we wouldn't expect to see many (AFAICT ANY) QWERTY-style
keyboards on Trek. The sole exception that comes easily to mind is in
ST IV, with Scotty knowing what to do with one when talking to the
mouse didn't work.
If he, and presumable everyone else in Trek didn't habitually use a
keyboard (a lot of what we call "data entry" is by voice, especially
logs), how did he acquire the skill to use one with such facility?
Mark L. Fergerson
Jack Bohn
> I know, it's an odd question. Over in rec.arts.sf.written there's a
>thread about past/present/future handheld gizmos and the question of
>data entry has come up, specifically that there is no keyboard on a
>Tricorder. I noted that an obvious alternative would be Palm's
>Graffiti, except that it hasn't caught on now and likely won't in the
>future.
On TOS, Kirk is often handed a large, clipboard-sized data pad,
which he signs with a stylus included in it. Extras can
sometimes be seen in the background, carrying it from station to
station, and either logging readings or working down a checklist,
or just looking busy.
>Hence we wouldn't expect to see many (AFAICT ANY) QWERTY-style
>keyboards on Trek. The sole exception that comes easily to mind is in
>ST IV, with Scotty knowing what to do with one when talking to the
>mouse didn't work.
Also in the past was "Assignment: Earth," where the visiting
advanced alien civilization had a special gizmo just to convert
an Earth typewriter to be able to take dictation by itself.
The only other thing that comes to mind is the row of switches
(yes, switches) 1-9 for entering the prefix code in "Wrath of
Khan." The odd thing was that each switch was moved up and left
up during the entry procedure.
--
-Jack
Robo-man
"nu...@bid.nes" <alie...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:7e53f33a-c3d3-43c6...@q40g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
I realize that this is a Star Trek news group, however look at this pic of
the Millennium Falcon's lounge area. It's the only pic from the Star Wars
universe that I can find a 'QWERTY' style keyboard in it.
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/e/e3/Falcon-lounge.jpg
And what I find really strange about it is how few 'display monitors' we
actually see aboard the Falcon. There are none at the engineering station in
the lounge area that Solo sits at to monitor the ship's systems. And only
ONE in the cockpit itself, which Solo uses for navigating to find Bespin
while fleeing the Empire.
Phillip Thorne
>The sole exception that comes easily to mind is in
>ST IV, with Scotty knowing what to do with one when talking to the
>mouse didn't work.
>
> If he, and presumable everyone else in Trek didn't habitually use a
>keyboard (a lot of what we call "data entry" is by voice, especially
>logs), how did he acquire the skill to use one with such facility?
The same way the crew of _Voyager_ can instantly intuit how to operate
controls of a Delta Quadrant race they've just now encountered for the
first time. At least in TNG "Conspiracy" it took Data a few minutes
of linguistic correlation to divine the labels on the Iconian
teleporter. And then he got it wrong.
Hmmm. Perhaps the alien *controls* are the smart ones, and rearrange
themselves to suit the silly organic operator from a species they've
never seen? The way the Nutrimatic machine aboard the _Heart of Gold_
would scan the user to design an optimal beverage.
Maybe Scotty has vintage keyboards in his quarters aboard the
_Enterprise_ (and some nixie tubes, too). Or he played with them as a
kid. Or Starfleet has a "historical control mechanisms" course (also
includes Vulcan punch cards and Tellarite patch boards). And as I
recall, he didn't have *facility* -- he was a two-fingered
hunt-and-peck typer in that scene, not a touch-typer.
--
** Phillip Thorne ** peth...@comcast.net **************
* RPI CompSci 1998 *
** underbase.livejournal.com ***************************
Patrick J. Murphy
Hey, this is *Scotty*. Kirk hands him a Romulan cloaking device -- a
completely new technology from a completely different culture with
(presumably) completely different engineering conventions -- and five
minutes later he's got it up and running. You think a *keyboard* is
going to slow him down?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of some smackdown laid on his sorry ass. - Stone Cold Jane Austen
Joseph Nebus
>Phillip Thorne <peth...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>Maybe Scotty has vintage keyboards in his quarters aboard the
>>_Enterprise_ (and some nixie tubes, too). Or he played with them as a
>>kid. Or Starfleet has a "historical control mechanisms" course (also
>>includes Vulcan punch cards and Tellarite patch boards). And as I
>>recall, he didn't have *facility* -- he was a two-fingered
>>hunt-and-peck typer in that scene, not a touch-typer.
>Hey, this is *Scotty*. Kirk hands him a Romulan cloaking device -- a
>completely new technology from a completely different culture with
>(presumably) completely different engineering conventions -- and five
>minutes later he's got it up and running. You think a *keyboard* is
>going to slow him down?
That's a fair observation, really. It's reasonable to suppose
part of crew training has to be figuring out interfaces in short order,
too, and after centuries of encounters with aliens if there are *any*
similarities in humanoid interface design they've got to be well-known,
except for where stuff was just standardized three thousand years ago
and everybody copies that. But probably after cutting his teeth on
Vulcan, Romulan, Klingon (remember how they worked out the Bird of Prey
of Uncertain Origins swiftly in _The Search For Spock_, even granting
that some of it was guessword), and so on, figuring an obsolete Earth
standard is probably nothing. It might be like making sense of Frisian
after getting both the non-Indo-European languages thrown at you.
The big example of keyboards from the Original Trek has to be the
semicircle of buttons at all the bridge console stations. They don't seem
to be an obviously recognizable keyboard, although if you were to get only
rough glimpses of the Linotype keyboard would you guess how to touch-type
on that?
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Goss
> The big example of keyboards from the Original Trek has to be the
>semicircle of buttons at all the bridge console stations. They don't seem
>to be an obviously recognizable keyboard, although if you were to get only
>rough glimpses of the Linotype keyboard would you guess how to touch-type
>on that?
One of the oddities of watching a sixties show is that keyboards have
SINCE come to symbolize interacting with machinery. In 1981, I was
taking a tour of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Apollo
control center was still there, behind glass. Standing in the public
area, looking over the control room, I couldn't see a single keyboard.
Everything was various discrete coloured and labelled buttons.
Keyboards were used for preparing programs, but once the programs were
running, you interacted with it by coloured buttons. I guess there
would be a keyboard somewhere for preparing text messages,
teletype-style.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
Jack Bohn
>I realize that this is a Star Trek news group, however look at this pic of
>the Millennium Falcon's lounge area. It's the only pic from the Star Wars
>universe that I can find a 'QWERTY' style keyboard in it.
>
>
>
>http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/e/e3/Falcon-lounge.jpg
And I never would have noticed that! Rather like the
scoreboard-style numbers counting down the range of the Death
Star near the end -- don't look too closely,
Worse would have to be V, where the Visitor's ships had QWERTY
control panels, and interacted with Earthlings, so we can't say
it's just an analogy the way English in Star Wars is really an
analog of the Basic language of the galaxy far, far away.
> And what I find really strange about it is how few 'display monitors' we
>actually see aboard the Falcon. There are none at the engineering station in
>the lounge area that Solo sits at to monitor the ship's systems. And only
>ONE in the cockpit itself, which Solo uses for navigating to find Bespin
>while fleeing the Empire.
Do you mean like those two gridded panes to the right of the
keyboard? I may be too influenced by something I read back when
George Lucas was more famous for American Graphiti, but I've
always thought of him as in the spaceship as car paradigm.
--
-Jack
alien8er
> "n...@bid.nes" <alien8...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:7e53f33a-c3d3-43c6...@q40g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>
> > I know, it's an odd question. Over in rec.arts.sf.written there's a
> > thread about past/present/future handheld gizmos and the question of
> > data entry has come up, specifically that there is no keyboard on a
> > Tricorder. I noted that an obvious alternative would be Palm's
> > Graffiti, except that it hasn't caught on now and likely won't in the
> > future.
>
> > OTOH Trek seems to lean toward a post-Apocalyptic scenario what with
> > the Eugenics Wars, WWIII, and so on, so maybe typewriter-style
> > keyboard skills just died out along with the majority of users of
> > same. Hence we wouldn't expect to see many (AFAICT ANY) QWERTY-style
> > keyboards on Trek. The sole exception that comes easily to mind is in
> > ST IV, with Scotty knowing what to do with one when talking to the
> > mouse didn't work.
>
> > If he, and presumable everyone else in Trek didn't habitually use a
> > keyboard (a lot of what we call "data entry" is by voice, especially
> > logs), how did he acquire the skill to use one with such facility?
>
>
I don't mind. Hell, I'm still trying to write a Wars/Trek crossover.
> however look at this pic of
> the Millennium Falcon's lounge area. It's the only pic from the Star Wars
> universe that I can find a 'QWERTY' style keyboard in it.
>
> http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/e/e3/Falcon-lounge.jpg
Damn me if you aren't right! I'd have sworn there were at least a
couple aboard the Death Star but some Google Imaging (Image Googling?)
finds none.
> And what I find really strange about it is how few 'display monitors' we
> actually see aboard the Falcon. There are none at the engineering station in
> the lounge area that Solo sits at to monitor the ship's systems. And only
> ONE in the cockpit itself, which Solo uses for navigating to find Bespin
> while fleeing the Empire.
I'm gonna guess it's because the Falcon is sposta be fairly elderly
when we first see her, and wouldn't have come with such things. Also
I'm guessing Solo wouldn't bother "upgrading" to them if the stock
instrumentation weren't adequate.
Not to mention the RW expense of maintaining not-blatantly-fake
graphics and text on those monitors that would look good on-screen. I
mean, look how much effort and money Trek puts into such things.
There's another point- I don't see it as much of a stretch to think
that Lucas wanted the Falcon's displays etc. to NOT look Trek-ish.
Mark L. Fergerson
alien8er
> On Sun, 6 Sep 2009, "n...@bid.nes" <alien8...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >The sole exception that comes easily to mind is in
> >ST IV, with Scotty knowing what to do with one when talking to the
> >mouse didn't work.
>
> > If he, and presumable everyone else in Trek didn't habitually use a
> >keyboard (a lot of what we call "data entry" is by voice, especially
> >logs), how did he acquire the skill to use one with such facility?
>
> The same way the crew of _Voyager_ can instantly intuit how to operate
> controls of a Delta Quadrant race they've just now encountered for the
> first time. At least in TNG "Conspiracy" it took Data a few minutes
> of linguistic correlation to divine the labels on the Iconian
> teleporter. And then he got it wrong.
I've tried and tried to come up with an in-Universe explanation for
that, but can't (and I have some trouble with your and Patrick
Thorne's suggestion about Starfleet Academy having classes on instant
grokking of ancient and never-before-seen interfaces). If Trek ever
returns to TV and addresses this point it'll probably be something
along the lines of the Universal Translator retcon.
> Hmmm. Perhaps the alien *controls* are the smart ones, and rearrange
> themselves to suit the silly organic operator from a species they've
> never seen? The way the Nutrimatic machine aboard the _Heart of Gold_
> would scan the user to design an optimal beverage.
Now that'd be convenient. But what about security issues?
> Maybe Scotty has vintage keyboards in his quarters aboard the
> _Enterprise_ (and some nixie tubes, too). Or he played with them as a
> kid.
I might buy that except he didn't recognize the mouse.
> And as I recall, he didn't have *facility* -- he was a two-fingered
> hunt-and-peck typer in that scene, not a touch-typer.
I remember the opposite; once he decided the keyboard was his only
option (despite it being "quaint") he hammered away at it pretty damn
quick except at the end where he did some one-finger flourishes.
Mark L. Fergerson
uray
news:4aa6fe34...@free.teranews.com...
>
> Hey, this is *Scotty*. Kirk hands him a Romulan cloaking device -- a
> completely new technology from a completely different culture with
> (presumably) completely different engineering conventions -- and five
> minutes later he's got it up and running. You think a *keyboard* is
> going to slow him down?
I love the way every race seems to use the same tools. I guess screw and
bolt heads are all the same in the future and any piece of alien machinery
can be disassembled and repaired with just a few basic tools.
Shit, I have to stock a boatload of specialized tools, in English and Metric
versions, in order to do the most basic things to some current machinery.
Phillip Thorne
out:
>Hey, this is *Scotty*. Kirk hands him a Romulan cloaking device -- a
>completely new technology from a completely different culture with
>(presumably) completely different engineering conventions -- and five
>minutes later he's got it up and running.
They're all lucky that the device was (a) removable and (b)
man-portable. Kirk would've been in trouble if the device massed ten
tons, or was too bulky to transport, or consisted of fifteen
widely-separated nodes around the ship.
We may assume that Starfleet had a good idea of what a cloaking device
would have to look like -- either theory or espionage -- and the
mission was approved because it was practical. By the same token,
they could've provided Scotty with the interface specs. (Was Kirk's
mission a complete surprise to the entire command crew, to maintain
plausible deniability? I forget. Maybe Starfleet provided an
interface kit in a sealed box. "Scotty, open Cargo Pallet #1207 and
follow the instructions.")