I’m glad they finally added the ‘stun’ setting to phasers. It’s much easier than clubbing someone over the head, like you had to do with the old models.
Back in the 80s, Larry Niven predicted flash mobs.
Max Headroom was Matt Frewer in makeup in front of a bluescreen. Now virtual characters like him are everywhere you go, even if not independently intelligent.
in one of the earliest James Bond movies , Bond was chasing a bad guy and had a screen in his car that showed a red dot moving along a map, tracking the guy’s moves. Incredible!
He didn’t just predict them – he created the idea and named it. It’s pretty clear to me that the recent “flash mob” craze was directly inspired by his ideas.
Of course, heis idea was that widespread teleportation technology allowed the rapid accumulation of mobs, whereas the recent fad was of assembling large groups of similarly-acting or interested people through the widespread use of social media.
I choose to believe that the people from that century were simply more enlightened than us.
They realized that all this reliance on digital networks made us fat and lazy. The pads are essentially a cultural thing that made them get off their butts once in a while 
It was reality long beforethe Jetsons. They were actually predicting medieval technology.
Lady Jane! Stop this crazy thing!
The idea of Memory Alpha kind of bugged me too when I started using the internet. I guess they didn’t think about subspace internet in DARPA back then.
They still haven’t invented the combination washer/drier featured in one episode of Lost In Space that actually folded the clothes for you.
Didn’t it also wrap them in plastic?
I remember an episode of the Jetsons in which George went to his doctor for an examination and the doctor gave him a pill to swallow. The pill had a miniature TV camera and a transmitter which gave the doctor a video picture of George’s insides as it traveled through his digestive system. This technology is often used in medicine today.
I also remember an episode in which one of Elroy’s friends had a wristwatch TV and was watching the Flintstones during class. Those became a reality first in the 80s, although it wasn’t self contained. You had a separate tuner which was connected to the display on your wrist like this one. Then, a few years ago, there was a fully self contained wrist TV with a color LCD like this one. As they had analogue tuners only, they are now obsolete since nearly all TV stations have switched over to digital broadcasts.
And I remember George reading the news on a large video monitor instead of reading an actual newspaper. Nowadays the Internet is one of the factors cited in the closings of newspapers across the country.
Hell, it’s still nearly impossible to get a combination washer/dryer that DOESN’T fold the clothes for you!
If I ever win the lottery, I’m quitting my job and working out how to make one of those in some affordable way. Now that 3D printers are getting to be more widely available, all I have to do is create it, patent the designs, and just sell the designs to people and they can build it (or mod it) on their own.
I’m also a little pissed that we can “replicate” organs now, but I still have to make my “Earl Grey, Hot” the hard way, damnitall.
On ST:TOS both Spock and Uhura used wireless earpieces (Bluetooth?) at their stations. And they also had lots of little data drives like very small hard floppy disks (or even oddly-shaped USB drives.) William Windom fidgeted with them on The Doomsday Machine.
As for the bucket of PADDS, maybe the crew members didn’t want their subspace phone sex calls from back home on the network…
Like Captain Queeg with ball bearings in The Caine Mutiny.
Really? I’ve got one in my kitchen. I just walked into a shop and bought it – I had a choice of models, too.
Lady Jane?
Was George married to the nine-day Queen of England?
That will always be the case because the Sirius Cybernetics Corp Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer will always produce a drink that is almost but not entirely unlike Tea. 
That was something I really missed in the later series. It made sense that the Communications station in particular would be getting tons of information that Uhura needed to be aware of but which would be unduly distracting for the rest of the bridge staff. Spock might have needed it less – I don’t recall Chekov ever bothering with it, and he was clearly Spock’s default relief – but I can imagine lots of people preferring to receive auditory rather than visual input.
Maybe when they make the Jetsons meet the Tudors movie.