(You might want to see this earlier article, News Flash: Hollywood Depictions of Hacking and Cracking are Not Accurate!)
Although Star Trek often got computer interfaces wrong (remember the monotone voice saying “Working…” whenever the Entriprise's computer got set to a task?), there's a great truth about UI in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
In that movie, Captain Kirk and company must return to Earth in the late 1980's to retrieve a pair of humpback whales. There's a scene in which Mr. Scott asks to use a plexiglass manufacturer's computer — a Mac Plus — with funny results. First he tries speaking to the machine, which has no result. He is then handed a mouse, which he looks at quizzically and then assumes is a microphone for voice commands. Finally, he's told to just use the keyboard, to which he replies “A keyboard? How quaint!”. The odd thing is that he starts types at something resembling 200 words a minute, although it's likely he's only seen a keyboard in the 23rd century equivalent of a history book.
User interface guru Jakob Nielsen points out this nitpicker's detail — “Time travellers can use current designs” — in his top ten list of Hollywood UI bloopers. I've listed his bloopers below, but for details, go visit his site:
- The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
- Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs
- The 3D UI
- Integration is Easy, Data Interoperates
- Access Denied / Access Granted
- Big Fonts
- Star Trek's Talking Computer
- Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls)
- You've Got Mail is Always Good News
- “This is Unix, It's Easy”
Of course, like the Hollywood depictions of computers that I blogged about earlier, these bloopers exist because they're good storytelling devices. That doesn't stop people from expecting computers to work this way, but then again, everything I know about American jurisprudence I learned from Law and Order…