CommanderFrank
Cat Can't Scratch It
- Joined
- May 9, 2000
- Messages
- 75,400
If you ever watched The Next Generation on TV, you would have noticed Captain Picard using a touch interface device aptly named PADD or Personal Access Display Device, which bears strikingly similar design and use to the iPad….. 23 years into the future. Could it be the Enterprise did another slingshot maneuver around the sun and met with Steve Jobs? I hope this won’t destroy the space/time continuum
For ST:TNG and beyond, Starfleet used touchscreen PADDs. The thin, handheld devices used the same interface as the control panels and computers on the Enterprise-D. "The idea was that we wanted to make them sleeker, slimmer, and way more advanced than the electronic clipboards were on the original series," Okuda said. But PADDs were much more powerful than electronic note pads. "We realized that with the networking capabilities we had postulated for the ship, and given the [hypothetical] flexibility of the software, you should be able to fly the ship from the PADD," Okuda said.