Modern Writers & TOS Technology

[Christopher]

When TNG has PADDs, Picard could have just entered the message into a PADD, and handed it to Deanna.

How does that remotely make sense? Their consoles are already networked together through the ship's data system. Why use a less efficient means of doing it, especially in a crisis situation where time is of the essence?

The whole text message thing was just a lame reference to cellphone tech, in an attempt to be cute...

No, it was not. It was a logical application of the computer technology of the Enterprise that has been known to exist since the very beginning of TNG. As I said, the use of "printout" messages as a secure means of conveying commands was established in "Encounter at Farpoint."

I mean, in the scene, they even used the .TXT abbreviation, lol. C'mon...

This statement contains two factual errors. One, they didn't use that abbreviation:

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/nemesis/ch19/nemesis565.jpg

Second, even if they had, it would be erroneous to think that file extension refers specifically to text messaging on cell phones. The .txt extension has been used for ASCII and other unformatted text files for decades.

And yes, the screen does say "TEXT MSG SENT," but surely you don't think that the term "text message" was invented to refer specifically to the transmission of such messages between telephones. The word "text" comes from Latin, for Pete's sake. It's existed as an English word for over 600 years.

In Diane Duane's Spock's World, the Enterprise's computer system incorporated the equivalent of a BBS or mailing list in 1980s format. There's plenty of precedent for the idea of Starfleet crewmembers being able to communicate textually through the ship's computer. The reference, there and onscreen, is not to cell phones, but to e-mail and computer networking.

As for the printout message in the series pilot... I'm pretty sure that just meant that the orders would appear on the black glass wall panels throughout the corridors, and that an actual paper printout was not to be utilized.

Well, obviously, but that's not even remotely the point. The point is that it's the exact same thing you're talking about in NEM, and it was a callback to something that was established in TNG 15 years earlier, not a reference to a contemporary fad. (The first text messaging system was developed in 1992, five years after "Farpoint.")

 

[Count Zero]

It's also a bit weird to assume that just because the story takes place in the future, all the technology must be futuristic. Sometimes, certain technologies are just already developed to perfection. Take books, for example, they've stayed pretty much the same way for centuries and probably will for more centuries to come. It seems quite logical to have the ability to communicate in textform between consoles and a text message won't probably be any fancier in 300 years than it is today.

 

[Greg Cox]

But the point is, that you shouldn't use modern-day analogs in TOS tech, because you'll just end up failing and dating things even more than they seem now, looking back on TOS. Forget all that... just remain true to the breed of technology in-universe... after all, you're telling a story about people in the 23rd century... you don't need to dumb it down, by using texting and such things.Again, to use the PADD analogy... why can't Kirk just jot something down on the clipboard, and have a Yeoman hand it to Uhura?

Well, in my case, this wasn't TOS, it was nuTrek, so I wasn't worried about being consistent with the original tv show. I probably would have written the scene differently if I was writing about Shatner's Enterprise. (If anything, I was constantly looking for ways--like the texting bit--to make my nuTrek book feel different and more contemporary than a traditional TOS novel.)

And, honestly, handing a clipboard to a Yeoman does seem horribly inefficient and clumsy under the circumstances. Again, if we can quietly send text messages now, it didn't make sense for a 2011 version of the Enterprise to be less high-tech.

Modern readers, of the sort who had only seen the new movie, might well wonder why Kirk didn't just signal Uhura electronically if he didn't want the Evil Alien Bad Guy to know what he was up to.

"Wait a second, Kirk! What are you doing with that clipboard?"

"Er, nothing, Evil Alien. I was just taking care of some paperwork during this tense starship battle. It's nothing you need to worry about."

"Really? You're not slipping secret orders to your crew?"

"Who, me? I was just signing off on some vacation requests."

"I don't believe you! Fire all photon torpedoes!"

"Oops. Maybe I should've texted Uhura instead . . . ."

 

[BolianAuthor]

How does that remotely make sense? Their consoles are already networked together through the ship's data system. Why use a less efficient means of doing it, especially in a crisis situation where time is of the essence?

How does it not? I mean, seriously, man... you take a PADD, write a note on it, and hand it to someone. No transmissions and no verbal communications. Sheesh... you really do have this obsession with disagreeing with me every time I state anything about anything.

In any case, I'm done with this matter... the OP asked a question, and I responded to it. I have also stated my own preference, and I'm not gonna go on and on about it to fuel an argument on the matter.

 

[Christopher]

How does it not? I mean, seriously, man... you take a PADD, write a note on it, and hand it to someone. No transmissions and no verbal communications.

Why is that better than using a transmission? It's slower, it's more cumbersome, and as Greg pointed out, it's an obviously stupid way to try to send a SECRET command to a member of your crew. We're talking about a situation where time was of the essence, where seconds could make the difference between life and death. Why the hell wouldn't any sane commander use the most efficient method possible to convey orders?

Sheesh... you really do have this obsession with disagreeing with me every time I state anything about anything.

I only disagree with statements that are factually incorrect, illogical, or unfair. I don't generally pay much attention to who's saying them. I have no obsession with you, since I don't know you from Adam. You're just one of many posters with cute gag names, and they mostly just blend together in my mind. All these fake names and photos make it hard to recognize people as individuals. So usually I respond to what's being said, not who's saying it. And I will disagree with any statement that is provably incorrect or logically inconsistent.

 

[JD]

I think the problem, BA, is that you are focusing to much on the text message terminology. Just think of it as him sending a silent message between two different computers. I don't see what's so horribly contemporary about that, pretty much anytime computers are networked you'll be able to send message between them, and in a situation like Nem. and even Greg's book, it makes sense to do it the quickest most efficient way. If you just ignore the terminology, it's not that "modern" of a thing, it's just something computers can do now, could do when we first started to network them (hell, it was probably one of the reasons computers were first networked) and they will be able to do it as long as we are networking computers.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Computer tech on TOS is not only dated, it was wrong at the time. An episode like "Court Martial" hangs on a bit of gibberish - the writer didn't know the difference between a CPU, memory and computer storage.

 

[Christopher]

If you just ignore the terminology, it's not that "modern" of a thing, it's just something computers can do now, could do when we first started to network them (hell, it was probably one of the reasons computers were first networked) and they will be able to do it as long as we are networking computers.

Heck, it's the very thing allowing us to have this pointless argument.


Getting back to the original question, though, about the "tapes" used in TOS, I think I just refer to them in my fiction as "data cartridges." Although I'm not sure if I've ever actually done that in a published work, because my published body of work includes precisely one short story set during the 5-year mission and only three works of fiction in the TOS era. (Memo to self: pitch more TOS ideas.)

 

[BolianAuthor]

How does it not? I mean, seriously, man... you take a PADD, write a note on it, and hand it to someone. No transmissions and no verbal communications.

Why is that better than using a transmission? It's slower, it's more cumbersome, and as Greg pointed out, it's an obviously stupid way to try to send a SECRET command to a member of your crew. We're talking about a situation where time was of the essence, where seconds could make the difference between life and death. Why the hell wouldn't any sane commander use the most efficient method possible to convey orders?

Sheesh... you really do have this obsession with disagreeing with me every time I state anything about anything.

I only disagree with statements that are factually incorrect, illogical, or unfair. I don't generally pay much attention to who's saying them. I have no obsession with you, since I don't know you from Adam. You're just one of many posters with cute gag names, and they mostly just blend together in my mind. All these fake names and photos make it hard to recognize people as individuals. So usually I respond to what's being said, not who's saying it. And I will disagree with any statement that is provably incorrect or logically inconsistent.

Look... I'm not going to argue about this... the reason I used the PADD example, is because you had correctly indicated that Captain Picard needed to communicate with Deanna privately. Thus, I, in agreement with you, cited the example of just jotting a note down on a PADD... THAT is how it is relevant to what you had said... because it's a private form of communication.

Going by what you said above, there was NO reason to disagree with or question what I had said, because it WAS factually correct... a written note on a PADD would be considered a private/discreet form of communication.

And you may think that you don't have some fixation with me, but I do, because EVERY SINGLE time I post anything, even when it's in agreement of something you state, you post something in reply either questioning what I said, or outright refuting it. You can go back into the site histories and check... I'm right.

Bottom line, you have your way of doing it, and I have mine. Let's just leave it at that, and be civil.

 

[Christopher]

Going by what you said above, there was NO reason to disagree with or question what I had said, because it WAS factually correct... a written note on a PADD would be considered a private/discreet form of communication.

But it would not be a sensible form of communication in that particular context, where time was of the essence. Therefore, it's a bad idea. And there's absolutely no legitimate reason not to send a text message directly from station to station.

 

[JD]

^ I'm sorry, but I'm with Christopher here. Why should Picard bother to waste the time and energy of writing on the PADD, and walking over to give it to Deann when he could just instantly send it directly to her console. Not to mention it'd be pretty damn obvious if he stopped what he was doing, wrote on the PADD and then passed it to Deanna.

 

[BolianAuthor]

You can be with whoever you want to be. I've said my bit.

 

[captcalhoun]

sorry, but i can't see how passing a note to someone is more believable than just fricking emailing them when you're trying to communicate covertly.

 

[Cybersnark]

The thing in Trek that annoys the hell out of me, is the stack of PADDs in TNG, DS9 and VOY, and the clueless directors who seemed to think each could only hold one file. I was saying to the screen back in the 90's that that wasn't how it was gonna go down, and guess what? iPads, smartphones and e-readers can hold entire libraries worth of books each.

It could also be a result of no one bothering to sync up and transfer files when you can just hand off the PADD and metaphorically wash your hands of it. Possibly file-syncing has a whole bunch of security-mandated password protections, so most people just don't bother

I'd imagine most of that stack-o-PADDS are only carrying a minuscule fragment of their storage capacity. Like a 4Gig flashdrive being used to ferry a couple of txt files and some jpegs.

I now have a mental image of some poor OCD-afflicted officer doing everything in his power to avoid being handed more PADDs, but no one listens to him. It's probably Tev.

 

[BillJ]

Going by what you said above, there was NO reason to disagree with or question what I had said, because it WAS factually correct... a written note on a PADD would be considered a private/discreet form of communication.

But it would not be a sensible form of communication in that particular context, where time was of the essence. Therefore, it's a bad idea. And there's absolutely no legitimate reason not to send a text message directly from station to station.

Couldn't Picard have just hit the 'mute' button and issued the command verbally? If we're talking about the most efficient manner to issue the order.

 

[PsychoPere]

Going by what you said above, there was NO reason to disagree with or question what I had said, because it WAS factually correct... a written note on a PADD would be considered a private/discreet form of communication.

But it would not be a sensible form of communication in that particular context, where time was of the essence. Therefore, it's a bad idea. And there's absolutely no legitimate reason not to send a text message directly from station to station.

Couldn't Picard have just hit the 'mute' button and issued the command verbally? If we're talking about the most efficient manner to issue the order.

It's been quite a while since I've seen Nemesis, so I can't recall the situation precisely, but doing so might have been looked upon with suspicion.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

(The first text messaging system was developed in 1992, five years after "Farpoint.")

Uh, if we assume that "text messaging" is not limited to today's "SMS Text Messaging," then it existed on mainframe systems long before Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims sold their first Altair. The timeshare system I used in high school (McGill University MUSIC, running on an IBM 370/135, in the late 1970s) had internal email programs like "BOX" and "COMM," as well as a "CHAT" program, (and even such interactive space war game programs as "LOGON" and "PLANET"), as well as a system command ("/REQ" if I remember right) that sent a one-line text message to the operator's console, and set off an alarm to make sure the operator knew there was a message.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And as far as the little rectangular data storage devices used throughout TOS, I'm inclined to follow Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's lead in referring to them as "record decks," an appropriately vague term that says nothing about what's inside, whether magnetic media, optical media, something similar to the CF cards I use both in my digital camera and as backup media for my notebook computer (antiquated enough to have no USB support, but it does have PCMCIA support, and CF is really just mini-PCMCIA), or something we haven't invented yet, like "solid crystal recording media" (which is more or less how FJS describes tricorder disks).

Back to text messaging: I work every day with IBM Midrange Systems. And sometimes, while I'm remotely signed on to a terminal session on some customer's box, trying to fix a problem, I'll be in a situation where I need certain other terminal session users to sign off, in order to release a lock that's keeping me from solving the problem. I can politely but firmly ask them to do so by issuing a command to the general effect of "SNDBRKMSG 'Please sign off this terminal session, so I can turn your file trigger back on.' DISP42" which would interrupt whatever they're doing, to deliver the message. Yet another text message that is not SMS.

And as to printout, well, we saw a hardcopy printout in The Cage, so why not?

 

[Greg Cox]

Couldn't Picard have just hit the 'mute' button and issued the command verbally? If we're talking about the most efficient manner to issue the order.

It's been quite a while since I've seen Nemesis, so I can't recall the situation precisely, but doing so might have been looked upon with suspicion.[/QUOTE]

And in my book, Kirk had to keep the Evil Alien Commander talking before he and Uhura pulled their sneaky little stunt.

Putting the bad guy on "Mute" would have been too provocative a move at that juncture. Better to keep talking while quietly texting his orders to Uhura . . . .

 

[Christopher]

I don't see why it's even necessary to look for ways Picard could've avoided sending a text message. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of sending a text message from one console to another. If anything, it's implicitly something they did all the time. Remember all those scenes where Picard would ask for damage reports and Worf would read something off his console and give a list of damage, casualties, or the like? What was he reading? Sure, some of it could've been automated readouts from the computer, but it stands to reason that he was reading text updates from personnel in sickbay, engineering, damage control, etc.

Really, it's bizarre that we're even questioning the idea in this forum. We are sending text from computer to computer. It's a proven and viable form of communication, and it's one that they clearly have the capability for on the Enterprise. Why is it remotely plausible or desirable to argue that they wouldn't use it?