What if a piece of consumer tech from the mid 90s helped explain? The Apple Newton brought offline handwriting recognition into the public perception and it was thought of as the Next Big Thing like AI or crypto. Inputs were all the rage in the 90s and handwriting recognition fell out of favor when speech to text software was released in the later half of the 90s.

Trek writers were trying to be forward thinking, and maybe there will be a handwriting resurgence that sees a maturation of the OCR tech, but for now it was a nice quiet piece of trivia that will be lost to time.