Posted on 01/05/2016 9:31:16 AM PST by Red Badger
Recovery comes just as 50th anniversary of “The Original Series†approaches
Documents written by “Star Trek†creator Gene Roddenberry have been recovered from 200 floppy disks owned by the late TV writer and producer.
DriveSavers and eDiscovery announced Monday that after months of work they were able to pull data from the disks, which Roddenberry used to store information while he was working on “Star Trek.â€
Mike Cobb, DriveSavers director of engineering, would not reveal what was on the disks, but he did offer some clues. “Lots of documents,†Cobb hinted in a press release. “2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original ‘Star Trek,’ anything could happen, the world will have to wait and see.â€
The original television series “Star Trek†ran from 1966 to 1969. Roddenberry created scripts for the futuristic show on a typewriter. Later, he used a pair of custom-built computers to record story ideas, scripts and notes. Over time, the author moved on to work with more mainstream computers, but kept the custom-built pair in his possession.
Although Roddenberry died in 1991, it wasn’t until much later that his estate discovered nearly 200 5.25-inch floppy disks. One of his custom-built computers had long since been auctioned and the remaining device was no longer functional.
But these were no ordinary floppies. The custom-built computers had also used custom-built operating systems and special word processing software that prevented any modern method of reading what was on the disks.
After receiving the computer and the specially formatted floppies, DriveSavers engineers worked to develop a method of extracting the data. There was no user manual for the computer, nor was there any technical documentation to help guide them.
It took over three months for the DriveSavers engineering team to develop software that could read the disks. Even though the engineers were able to crack the unusual formatting, reading the nearly 200 disks took the better part of a year to finish.
Paramount Pictures will release the latest entry in the rebooted “Star Trek†film franchise, “Star Trek Beyond,†in 2016. CBS also recently announced plans to launch a new “Star Trek†series on CBS All Access in 2017.
Knowing Roddenberry, they probably contained pictures taken by a hidden camera in the Women’s dressing rooms.
Guy was a big perv.
Gene Rodenberry gave a presentation at my college (1975) in which he talked about the development of the series, showed some out takes, etc. I don't know about "firing Shatner", but I do remember him saying that when NBC agreed to pick up the series, they told him to "lose the guy with the funny ears." They felt that Spock wasn't a very believable character. Rodenberry resisted, and of course the character stayed. Also, he first offered Star Trek to CBS, who was looking for a Sci-Fi series at the time. They turned him down in favor of "Lost In Space."
My first introduction to word processing was with WordStar:
http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Wordstar
A friend of mine made one of those for his own use in 1980...............
Then fully booted still no gui, not even a CRT display... the interface terminal was a Teletype...oddly that machine had the old “Star Trek” game ...
output in ASCII drawings.. the first computer game was not a video game.. it was a teletype printer game ;)
I PLAYED THAT!....................had a printout of the old commands up until the late 90's when I cleaned out the shed!....................
“How to Make Roman Ale”
Aggggghhhhh! WordStar! I had to wrestle with that on my cpm Kaypro back in the ‘80s. The only good aspect was that learning to format for bold and underline words was good practice when I learned HTML coding.
Me too - Star Trek and Rogue on a VAX 11/780 kept me alive through college in 1983. :)
Yep I ran a PDP8...to boot you had to enter the bootstrap loader on the front panel via 16 switch's (16 bits)...think it was five opt codes you had to enter in the first five memory locations...then hit run... this then would boot a “pizza box†drive (16 inch cartridge platter)
The bootstrap we used was two words loaded at 0030. The first told the RK05 to read the first block and the second jumped to itself. This would get overwritten as the block was read and then you were off to the races.
the first computer game was not a video game.. it was a teletype printer game
Actually, the first video game was a tennis-type game built in the '50s with an analog computer and an X/Y oscilloscope. I forget in which magazine I saw an article about it.
Dec Rainbow? Those were rare.
Aggggghhhhh! WordStar!
WordStar was awesome. Among the great things was that you could largely convert a WordStar document to ASCII by simply PIPping it [Z].
Could be 'cause the mentality fits. Romulus is just outside Detroit...
Yeah, Roddenberry’s ideas for the movies were generally pretty bad. When they reigned him in, the movies were good. When they didn’t, they were mediocre. When the cast members started writing and directing, they became REALLY bad.
He had naked photos of the Star Trek babes on those disks.... : )
He probably wrote that scene....!
I had a floppy disk in my Commodore C64...I wonder if they could get the data off of them...(err..better not...I was a teen in the early 80s...)
WordStar was great...I wrote a few stories on my C64, Coleco Adam and TRS80...
> My first introduction to word processing was with WordStar:
^KB ^KK ^KC ^KY
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