Star Trek

I’ve looked at many of the panels in star trek, and nowhere have I seen a keyboard. How do they wright letters? I’m sure that the only way to input information isn’t only by voice, cause some species can’t speak. They’ve typed in words before. How is this possible? The only thing on the consoles and menus are little buttons with numbers on it. How do they type?

the consoles are multifunctional, a little bit like the screen of a palm pilot, if you want to have a keyboard u just select the menu option keyboard, type what you have to then remove the keyboard from the screen,

That’s kind of in-efficient, especially seeing how they have to create reports of the days activities every day, and about the happinings of shifts.

Ever heard of speech recognition ?

Ever heard of touch screens and pointing devices?

These exist NOW !!! so why wouldn’t they use pull down menus of characters as well as the above ?

Remember on the Star Trek movie where the TOS crew returns to Earth in the 1970’s to pick up a whale? Scottie and McCoy are demonstrating something on a Macintosh computer, and Scottie is surprised it doesn’t have voice recognition at first, but when he catches on that it uses a keyboard he puts his hands on it and goes to town.

That proves something interesting: first, that they still use keyboards, and second (much stranger) that they still use QWERTY. (Unless the Macintosh was set up for Dvorak, which is unlikely.) Since Qwerty is obsolete as of today, I think it’s odd -- in fact outrageous -- that kids are still being taught to use it, when they can easily configure any machine they use for Dvorak, and change it back when some old person wants to use Qwerty again.