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

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-data,-jim,-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

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When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work.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

15 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. This is what really happened by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  2. I know! by mitcheli · · Score: 5, Funny

    It said to never hire J J Abrams.

    --
    Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
  3. pcworld = crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    And get off my lawn.

    1. Re:pcworld = crap by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:pcworld = crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can anyone please explain how CP/M relates to "stuff that matters"? :-D

  4. "Custom OS" by Erbo · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Be who you are...and be it in style!
  5. No big deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  7. Floppies never got more reliable, either by damn_registrars · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  8. Re:Cluelessness by amRadioHed · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
  9. Re:Given a choice in the 70's by russotto · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    Unless she can manage to set lp0 on fire. Though this takes Elaine Roberts level hackery.

  10. Center of Pressure [Re:pcworld = crap] by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 4, Funny

    Indeed,

    CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.

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    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  11. Re:Given a choice in the 70's by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

  12. Overthinking the story. by westlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:It's probably 99% crap by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    I read the internet for the articles.