I don't fundamentally disagree with what you said, but it's important to point out that in the entire run of TOS, including the pilots, we saw a grand total of ONE sheet of paper-like material get printed out. Am I wrong about that?section9 said:
Dadgum, but we are looking for the 1701, kids. Problem is, Dr. Boyce can't come walking in with his hip flask of very dry martini. Cabins can't look like a Motel 6.
Look, people don't pop diskettes into the comm board to have a sheaf of paper data pop up out of the printer. Not since, say, 1997, anyway. What will change will be the ship's internals.
Watch for some jokester to put Apple insignias somewhere on the ship. I suspect that the ship remains basically the same.
And the "floppy disk" you mentioned. Well... maybe we don't use floppies much anymore, but we DO use removable media every bit as much today as we ever have. I can't imagine removable media going away. Today we use "thumbdrives" or "memory sticks" or whatever... but the concept is the same. I honestly don't foresee that going away, not today, not next year, not in 200 years. I DO imagine that each of those little "floppy disk" devices probably could hold the Library of Congress, scanned to high-resolution TIF format... but that, like always, they'll find a way to fill 'em up entirely.
For example... the "meal cards" that people carry around and slip into the messhall food slots. Why can't those cards carry individual replicator patterns for the person's individual dietary plan? We know that they get their food "assigned" (McCoy assigned Kirk a "green leaves" diet for a while, remember!)