It was also designed at a time when most of the population had never used a GUI on a computer. The show debuted in 1987, so the pre-filming work would have been happening a year or two before that.
Think about what the few graphical desktops on computers looked like in the mid 1980s… then recall that most people did not have a computer at home, and only used one at work if at all.
I’m not defending LCARs or anything - I am just trying to imagine what it would have been like to be a graphic designer in 1985, and someone comes up to you and says “We want you to make us what computer interfaces will look like in the 24th century.”
In terms of interfaces we see on Star Trek, I think the, mostly touch, interfaces we see in the TMP movies (the movies with the original series cast, for the non-Trek fans reading this) appear to be MUCH more practical.
I’m the same in that I was in elementary school when the NES was “the thing to have”… but I don’t think we could afford it at the time.
When I asked my parents for an NES for my seventh birthday in 1989, I got a 2600 and 40-ish games instead. Years later my mom told me she bought the whole thing at a yard sale for about $40.
It wasn’t the latest and greatest… but I didn’t care. I loved it. I had a great time exploring the cartridges, most of them had manuals to go with them, and playing with my dad.
An uncle would later give us an old 386 PC and I played DOS games on it.
I did get a SNES around 1992, so I did have my fair share of Nintendo as a kid. But I certainly didn’t start there and knew that there was more to video games than Nintendo.
I was still playing my 2600 and SNES when I graduated from high school, along with playing CRPGs on the family computer too.