When I was working on the first "Star Trek" film ("Star Trek: The Motion Picture" aka ST:TMP - 1979) I at one point was tasked with creating the Klingon written language, which of course I had absolutely no expertise to do. Luckily, it moved on to someone else. I had this idea for a calculation pad for Spock -- he could scribble on it and it would form up in nice text and show intermediate results, etc. (so, like a contemporary tablet and software now that actually exist). I got fairly far along with this, but we suddenly had an epiphany. We hadn't seen the forest for the trees. He's Spock! He don't need no damned calculation pad! We dropped the idea. Meanwhile I successfully convinced the powers-that-be that the round data screens on the Enterprise didn't make sense, they wasted too much space. I argued that really they should be holographic (the more recent Trek series eventually caught up with that idea!) but at a minimum they should be rectangular. My idea was accepted! No more silly round screens! But if you watch those films, you see that there ARE round screens. Why? A few days after I was told they would switch to rectangular, I got word that the round screens had already been cast in fiberglass and there was no budget to redo them. So round they stayed. If I had pushed the idea somewhat sooner the change probably could have gone through. So if you want to partly blame me for
those round screens on the Enterprise, you wouldn't be wrong. -L