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The closing credits for the new season of Star Trek: Picard has the best closing credits ever: a montage of LCARS user interface glamour shots.

Today we’re surrounded by flat panel screens that we control and navigate with multitouch gestures, tablet computers with wireless network connections to a vast network of data libraries, front-facing cameras so you can have a video, and computers that respond when you call out, “Hey Siri/Google/Alexa/Cortana”.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, the new futuristic Enterprise’s Library Computer Access and Retrieval System (LCARS) and Personal Access Display Device (PADD) was far beyond the text-based operating systems, early windowing interfaces, and CRT monitors of the time.

Apple’s original Macintosh was only 3 years old and a major feature of the brand-new Macintosh II was color.