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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When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work.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.
They found kilobytes and kilobytes of nudie RTTY art. The only one they could have published was this one so they decided to just put the floppies back in the box and forget the whole thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It said to never hire J J Abrams.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Fanfold printouts.
I'm a little sad that programmers these days don't even know what that is.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> 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!
This is slashdot. Stop lecturing us about what CP/M was.
And get off my lawn.
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.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
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.
CP/M machines are readily available on ebay.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...
Click buy it now, whip out the credit card, wait for delivery.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I had floppies in the 90s and beyond that were terrible for longevity. More than once I had a carefully handled 3.5" DSHD floppy eat shit while being carried from one computer to another in the same room.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It has a very simple file layout. A more likely cause of the problem is that computers that ran CP/M typically had unusual disk drives - that is, the number of tracks, sectors per track, etc, varied tremendously between manufacturer.
The file system itself though? Not a problem. It's simpler than FAT. It's so simple it can be easily reverse engineered with a hexeditor, even if you don't have any documentation and have never heard of CP/M before (been a while, but from memory: first few sectors after boot are a directory, using 32 byte blocks - 12 bytes for file name and user number, then the remainder identify the sector clusters - called extents in CP/M jargon - the file occupies, with multiple entries used if the file used more than 20 extents.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
LOL ... I have very fond memories of fan-fold greenbar paper to mark up some code with a coffee for an hour or so before I went back to fix the code.
Programming involved a lot more thinking and planning, instead of bashing it until it compiled.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Unless she can manage to set lp0 on fire. Though this takes Elaine Roberts level hackery.
I miss those days.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah, but what kind? Thermal? Dot matrix? Daisy-wheel?
Oh wait, "line printer"? Holy shit, I just learned something new today.
Indeed,
CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
We're better off without fanfold paper. When I was in college in the early 1990's, a roommate borrowed some paper to complete his ten page final report. I don't know what caused him to get paper from the middle and not the end of the stack. When it came time to print out my 200+ page final report for technical writing, I ran out of paper halfway through printing. Reloading the printer and resuming the printout from where I left off was a tricky operation back then. I only had enough paper to get it right the first time to avoid turning it in late. Since I was using a Commodore 64, I couldn't ride my bike over to Kinko's to print out on the laser printer. My roommate had no clue to how close he came to dying that day.
Programming involved a lot more thinking and planning, instead of bashing it until it compiled.
Try translating an old BASIC game into a modern programming language. All those GOTO and GOSUB statements can get tedious. I spend a fair amount of my time mapping what goes where in the program before I can even start coding. For fun, of course.
http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/
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.
In fairness, it did lose. Nobody is going to go out and buy a new CP/M system.
That there are still ancient machines running this stuff surprises nobody. But, let's face it, everybody knows it's antiquated.
What people often fail to realize is that antiquated technology which still works is far more useful than the brand new hotness which can't do the same thing.
Because what people often fail to realize is that bomb-proof code (no pun intended in your case) which has been optimized to fit into a small memory footprint and been running for decades does exactly what it's supposed to, and does it well.
All these kiddies forget that you couldn't just write bloated code and then suggest people go buy more RAM. Well, they don't forget it, they have no idea of what it meant to have to squeeze code into what is now considered trivial amounts of RAM.
I remember having to cram some sparse information into the tiniest amount of memory I could devise because more memory wasn't an option. Meanwhile a friend who had admin perms just assumed he could have a huge whack of virtual memory on the VAX and didn't care about how he stored it. The prof ended up stealing how I did it for his own stuff, because accounting for architecture mine was about 10x faster as a result of being 100x smaller in memory -- precisely because wasting memory wouldn't work and I needed to create a new data structure to get it done.
Nowadays the idea of optimizing for performance or memory gets you looked at like you've lost your mind. "Why optimize when you can have more memory or CPU?" Write shit code now and don't worry about it. Of course, the problem is once you realize it's shit code you can't fix the underlying problem because your 'elegant' code isn't capable of being fixed.
Hmmm ... where was I ... oh yeah, I had an onion on my belt, because that was the style ... ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You, sir, are truly hardcore.
Having spent a good chunk of my career maintaining legacy code for which the original authors have long since moved on, I can say it's a special skill to wade though existing code and figure out what the hell it does and how to fix/modify it.
I've known several people who ran screaming from legacy code. It's not for everybody.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Can you control the roller in a line printer?
If so, couldn't you just tell the printer to back up a line before printing the new line?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The sum total of my intellectual property is a somewhat popular Warcraft UI and a few websites (so basically, jack shit), and even I have that data spread across a few different backup mediums. If I had anything even remotely as valuable to fans as pretty much ANYTHING Roddenberry made I'd probably have it in multiple safety deposit boxes in different timezones. How could he let that happen?
Remember that you are talking about a period in time before making backups in case of loss was a thing with the consumer. Also, keep in mind that the idea of copies would be foreign in this time to a lot of writers. Many would type up their manuscripts and papers and then send the only copy in to a publisher with the expectation of it being mailed back if not accepted. Hemingway lost a lot of his work when his wife lost a suitcase carrying a great deal of his stuff. I was in a writer seminar with Harlan Ellison who talked a great deal about how to protect your manuscript with extra coversheets and how to make sure they send it back. Still, I expect that there were copies but they were probably hard copies but only of things that were finished. I wouldn't be surprised if any complete works in these disks match paper print outs that were in his effects.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I invented coding.
Guy below me invented inventing, though.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
I thought most of the Season 1 scripts were Phase 2 scripts that were dusted off, so that seems an odd claim. I agree that the first two seasons were pretty blah in comparison to the middle years, when the show hit its stride. I don't recall anything overtly sexist, save perhaps for Riker's alpha male swagger, but I'm assuming that was because they wanted some sort of James T. Kirk in the show. I do remember Data bedding one of his ship mates, maybe that's what they're talking about.
In reality, Roddenberry wasn't the key writer in Star Trek. He certainly came up with the core ideas, and doubtless had a lot to do with beating the scripts into shape. But probably the person most responsible at least for TOS for the feel of Star Trek was Gene L Coon. Coon invented the Prime Directive, which is a constant through all the series. He also developed characters like Khan, who still stands as one of the best SciFi villains ever, not to mention the Klingons. Coon has never got the recognition he deserved, despite his contributions to Star Trek being just as critical to its success, and to its mythology, as Roddenberry.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Once when I was setting up a dedicated syslog server I installed a dot matrix printer on a serial line in a locked room. The final touch was snipping the transmit+ pin to make it truly write-only.
I don't recall anything overtly sexist, save perhaps for Riker's alpha male swagger, but I'm assuming that was because they wanted some sort of James T. Kirk in the show. I do remember Data bedding one of his ship mates, maybe that's what they're talking about.
There is a lot of really horrible season 1 episodes with things like sexism and racism taken to extremes.
The ep you are thinking of was "The Naked Now", although that script was a direct copy from the original series ep "The Naked Time", so I can understand your conclusion regarding having a Kirk figure in TNG.
<enable-nerd level='high'>
But there was also "Justice", a planet of nearly naked people who spend most of their time "playing at making love" (although also attempting to punish Wesley with death for breaking a law he committed no act to break. Although killing Wesley, not sure I want to hold that against them :P )
"Haven" which promotes the forced marriage of Troy against her will as a good thing.
"The Dauphin" in s2 is the same theme just the forced marriage of a non-show regular against her will.
"Angel One" with the planet only women can be in government and men only sex slaves or laborers (not feminism, but sexism against males none the less)
"Up The Long Ladder" where picard forces the peoples of two worlds to forced mating and polygamy/polyandry, where one of those worlds are people consisting of only clones who don't have sex, had sexual reproduction evolved out of their makeup generations past, and find the idea both disgusting and repulsive. :P
(closest bad analogy I can think of: imagine forced sex with someone of the same gender if you are straight, or with someone of the opposite sex if your not. Next, imagine you are the "lucky" one that gets the forced sex with someone who prefers making their own new holes that you didn't have before)
Picard even makes fun of them and the situation saying "In time they will get used to it, and maybe even enjoy it" followed by laughter of the bridge crew present.
Yes Picard, let's assign to you 5 husbands with forced sex every day and night, and see how much you "maybe even learn to enjoy it"
And the worst IMHO is "The Child", where Troy is raped in her sleep and impregnated by an alien being, where multiple times through the show she behaves and talks as if she enjoyed it, and that it was the best experience of her life.
Note she wasn't just referring to having/raising the child, but the entire experience explicitly including the impregnation, despite not being awake during.
No feelings of being violated, not even a "mixed bag" sort of thing, just a wonderful experience through and through.
Some honorable mentions are "Where No One Has Gone Before" awkwardly and painfully exploring all of the joys of man-boy-love between Wesley and that traveler guy.
(Though I admit everything was "only implied" and not outright stated, so it's understandable if one decides to not interpret the show in that way)
Plus "Code of Honor", where in it is shown in the trek universe there actually is a planet of all black people, and they only get the one, with a leader that talks like James Earl Jones with an extra helping of tribal ebonics.
(Disgustingly an episode completely forgotten about a couple years later when writer Michael Baron publicly claimed that black people aren't specifically being excluded from being actors on the show, it's just that in LA there are not many black actors in existence to choose from. Of course obviously not true but this ep proves it isn't even true in his own tiny sphere of influence let alone in general.)
I'm sure you can find even longer lists of sexism and such in trek if you look. These are just the ones that stand out to me personally as particularly embarrassing to have watched.