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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When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work.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.
Unfortunately, we still don't know. The Roddenberry estate hasn't commented yet, and the data recovery agency is bound by a confidentiality agreement.
No.
CP/M standardized the dirs and file system. Even ZCPR3 added on top was straightforward and wouldn't take you an hour to figure out.
Yes, there were different sector setups. You run through them all until you find the format. That takes an hour. So complex? No.
And no, most word processors used text files. Things were WAY more straight-forward in the days of CP/M. DOC, RTF and ODF are nightmares compared to CP/M-based word-processor formats. OK, let's say this was an odd one. So you run the damn software he used under a CP/M emulator and you print the files to the emulated rs232 port and capture the output.
This is a trivial problem and there's absolutely no way anyone with a half a brain could have taken a year to do it.