Does anyone in starfleet know computers

This is actually relevant today in this universe so read on.

Sometime between TOS and TNG, it seems even the top engineers have lost touch of how their computers even worked on the most basic level. This was very evident in the second season of TNG when the Yamato was destroyed and the Enterprise crippled by a computer virus. And the solution was literally "turn it off and back on again, reboot and reload from protected backups". And it took the whole episode to figure it out. And Voyager when it seemed like the crew didn't know how to back up the Holodoc.

The reason behind this is because things have become so abstract in the Star Trek world than nobody actually knows how the computer itself works; they only know what to do in the highest abstraction layer and are stunned and bewildered when things go wrong in the lower levels The same thing is happening now with software. Does anyone at Microsoft even know how Windows actually works anymore as far as low level processes go? How about Apple, or Android? How many people in those fields know how to do anything useful in assembly language?

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anonymous Other December 04, 2025 at 5:57 am 0 0