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When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work.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

Cluelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

> According to Cobb, the majority of the disks were 1980s-era 5.25-inch double-density disks capable of storing a whopping 160KB—that's kilobytes—or about one-tenth the capacity you can get on a $1 USB thumb drive today. Cobb said a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M.

Who wrote TFA is clueless. 160 kb is one tenth of current USB thumb drives? Yeah, sure, we get 1,5 Mb those... orders of magnitude matter!

Re:pcworld = crap

[arth1]

My thoughts exactly. If there is one place where you do not have to explain what CP/M is, it's here.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[arth1]

I still use a dot matrix printer with fanfolds for security logs. While an intruder can erase logs on a system, or DoS a network connection to a remote syslog server, or even kill printing processes before a laser print has come out, she cannot erase what has been printed out on a line printer.

Overthinking the story.

[westlake]

Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

You have a tight budget and a bare 50 minutes to tell your story. Landing the big ship [miniature sets, props and puppetry] will take time and money you don't have. Teleportation is a dirt cheap effect trivially easy to stage that saw its first use in silent films.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[jandrese]

2. Money: Ok we may not need money, but some form of system to make sure the population is doing things that are needed to be done. Jobs that are in shortage but high demand get paid more. Jobs which can be easily filled and are not needed much get paid less. With no incentive people will tend to trend towards the jobs they want to do. So we get a lot of bad poets and street musicians.

This was kind of the point though. Automation had progressed to the point that nobody had to work if they didn't want to, or they could be street musicians and still have a good life.

Obviously it's not completely post-scarcity. Not everybody can have their own Galaxy class starship, or their own planet, etc... But it's more like a souped up socialist paradise where everybody has a guaranteed minimum quality of life and if they want to improve their life they can but if they don't then they won't starve to death or freeze or even have to worry about money. There are no shitty jobs, they've all been automated or replaced by replicators.