Star Trek, especially TOS, are all about drudgery. As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button. Even in the more recent episodes, you constantly had people hauling around those little pads in order to give information to somebody, rather than transmitting it via the (presumably) incredibly advanced computer which is linked to and controlling the entire ship.
If I email you my report, you can ignore it. If I hand you a pad locked on the report till you acknowledge that you read it, your attention has been put to the task at hand. If I were putting together the social organization scheme for running a space ship, I might take advantage of that. In TOS, pads were first used by the captains for reviewing and acknowledging that they had seen various reports.
> As I recall, they had to manually place torpedoes on the launch racks, and firing the phasers involved Kirk giving the order to fire, which is relayed by the weapons officer to a poor schmuck sitting in the phaser room, who then presses a button.
