Gene Roddenberry's Floppy Disks Recovered (pcworld.com)

Press2ToContinue writes: When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. To make matters worse, about 30 of the disks were damaged, with deep gouges in the magnetic surface. "Cobb said a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M. CP/M, or Control Program for Microcomputers, was a popular operating system of the 1970s and early 1980s that ultimately lost out to Microsoft's DOS. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the wild west of disk formats and track layouts, Cobb said. The DOS recoveries were easy once a drive was located, but the CP/M disks were far more work. " So what was actually on the disks? Lost episodes of Star Trek? The secret script for a new show? Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

Unfortunately, we still don't know. The Roddenberry estate hasn't commented yet, and the data recovery agency is bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Comments

pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. Stop lecturing us about what CP/M was.

And get off my lawn.

"Custom OS"

[Erbo]

Some sources claim that Roddenberry's computers ran a "custom OS." However, in those days, CP/M was often customized for different brands of computers, which used different disk formats and layouts (for whatever reason). Roddenberry's machine may have used a particularly obscure layout.

They do mention that the disks had about a 160 Kb capacity, which was fairly standard for Shugart 5-1/4" floppy drives of the time.

No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with a Commodore 128 and a 1571 disk drive or 128D should be able to work with CP/M files once they've been read... and the 128 should also be able to read the disks themselves.

Re:Cluelessness

[amRadioHed]

On Amazon you can get drives ranging from 2-8 GB in the 1-2 dollar range. There's also a 128MB one for a cent. Any way you parse it, the numbers are way off.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[mikael]

The biggest danger to trying to resurrect an old floppy disk using a still functional disk drive, is that the modern day OS will try stomping all sorts of dot files into every directory. Need to make sure the disk is write-protected before using.