Did Kirk have an office?

That's true, but also: Kirk used his quarters to meet and question people (Harry Mudd, Captain Christopher...) because Kirk was based on Horatio Hornblower, who couldn't dream of having an office aboard a wooden, sailing warship.

Hornblower's quarters not only had to double as his office, the room was literally dismantled, hastily, every time the ship went to general quarters (what Star Trek calls red alert). The order was "Clear for action!" and they meant it.

 

I'm having some frustrations here! Kirk gets left out of everything. No bathroom! No office/ready room! Doesn't get to fight the Borg!

I think it would have been cool, though. Get to know Kirk a little more personal. I bet Cawley's Kirk's office has an Elvis on black velvet painting.

 

True, but on frigates and ships of the line the captains' cabins were big enough that they were subdivided into parts that were used as living space and other parts as office space.

Also touched upon in this thread from the movies forum:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=244768&page=2

 

As I recall, with some of the ships Hornblower commanded, his captain's cabin held a portion of the ship's naval artillery. During general quarters there were gun crews in his sleeping area.

 

As far as I could tell, Sick Bay might as well have been his office.

 

Kirk had a desk with a computer (the show was made before computers had screens). My impression was his quarters contained a bathroom (never shown), bedroom, and office/public area. That's the place intended for him to have guests. This is shown in Uhura's quarters in Elaan of Troyius.

The gym is shown in Charlie X.

 

He had a monitor.

 

And also, at one point, a computer with a female personality.

 

Nah. Computers had screens before Star Trek. For instance, the PDP-1 had a Type 30 Precision CRT display in the early 1960s (link, p.33–36).

 

It is interesting that there is no visable input device for most of these computers other that disks and voice command....other than the six or so switches that is.

 

Maybe there was a projected keyboard (holographic?) on to the desk top, we have something like that already. From the cameras angle you just couldn't see it, only the user could.

 

Or possibly voice command input- Scotty in ST4 was trying to use that mode in the Transparent Aluminum scene. After trying to talk into the mouse he thought having to use a keyboard 'quaint'.
One thing though- in that scene when you do see him typing he is doing it incredibly fast and the stuff being displayed was far beyond what could be created by a simply keyboard using an unknown OS.

 

The scene an embarrassment for those of us who want serious Star Trek. For Scotty to suddenly use a qwerty keyboard at that speed, a keyboard his century has seemingly never seen, was cartoonish. It was like the film saying "Yeah, were kidding around here, just bear with us and the story will resume momentarily."

They should have dramatized a little time lapse while Scotty labored over the computer. But then comes Scotty's cavalier rationale for giving out the formula and disrupting the timeline that leads to his own future, and seriousness takes another blow.

 

That film was a comedy.

 

There was a lot of stuff I found embarrassing in this film.

 

I always assumed that, with the iPad-like wedge tablets being ubiquitous, they could always write reports or make drawings on one of those. With 300 years for hardwriting recognition software to evolve, these devices could do amazing things compared to what we do even today. Voice commands/dictation is also another possibility. As for the notion of QWERTY keyboards being used in the 23rd century (either TOS or movie era), why not? In some cases, it is still faster or easier to compose some thoughts (text or other forms) through the use of a keyboard and pointing device. Both the TOS and movie era showed us variety of control interfaces, including voice-commands, switches, knobs/dials, levers, buttons, toggles, touch-screens, and stylus-on-pads. If we can imagine Kirk dispensing "the captain's log" in the commode, why can't he also have a recessed keyboard tray under that little table/desk in his quarters?

It makes sense, doesn't it?

 

Yes, it almost seemed like James Doohan had never used a computer before, the way he was pounding away at the keys wasn't convincing in the least. I agree that the scene could have been drawn out or broken into two parts in order to give "Scotty" time to figure out how to use the antique Macintosh.

 

The film was a comedy for sure- I guess they were trying to show that Scotty was a master of technology and could make even old machinery dance when he wanted to. One thing the movie skipped over but was in the novel was that the fellow Scotty gave the formula to was credited with inventing Transparent Aluminum already. This does provide the potential for a time loop, but then again he could have invented it by himself and getting the formula early did not change much.

 

Well, that's continuity for you. Old machinery, alien machinery - what's the difference? Scotty can handle the latter, so the former should be easy as well, or else something is amiss.

Although we should remember that the tabletop Mac was probably alien machinery as well. Henry Starling would already be at it, after all.

I can accept handwriting-based input methods, but I don't think typing on an alphabetical keyboard is the epitome of manual input. Handwriting recognition is a nice toy, but the real power lies in recognizing the intent behind the writing, and we're making leaps in that respect as well. It really should follow that text could be fluently created by typing in at most 10% of it. And the keyboard needed for that would certainly not need 25 separate keys.

(We'll probably have that tech in ten years or less, but admittedly the world of science fiction generally involves slower pace of technology development. Then again, if it takes a century to develop the tech in Trek, Starling will loop it back to the 1980s and install it in that Mac anyway...)

Timo Saloniemi