“Call the engine room and get Scotty to the bridge: When the long-lost words of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were found on 5.25-inch floppies — yes, floppy disks — it would take a Starfleet-level engineering effort to recover them,” Gordon Mah Ung reports for PCWorld.
“Roddenberry, who died in 1991, apparently left behind a couple of shoebox-sized containers of those big floppy disks,” Mah Ung reports. “The problem? As any techie knows, floppy drives went out off fashion around the turn of the 21st century. Even if you bought a used 5.25-inch floppy drive off of Cyrano Jones on space station K7, you wouldn’t be able to read the files on a modern computer, let alone plug in the drive.”
“Roddenberry’s estate knew of two possible computers the author had used to write those final words,” Mah Ung reports. “One had been sold off in a charity auction and the second wouldn’t boot when plugged in.”
Find out how, and how many of, Gene Roddenberry’s words were recovered here.
MacDailyNews Take: According to this listing, Roddenberry’s computer carries the IBM identification number “GS 113302” and features dual floppy disk drives with built-in monitor and separate keyboard. This early portable IBM PC retailed for nearly $3,000 in the early 1980s.
While Gene Roddenberry is often associated with the Macintosh, he apparently did some earlier writing on this early model IBM computer
That’s why I keep a scattered assortment of old Macs so I can recover just about anything in the entire Mac lifetime and then jump thru hoops to get it on a current Mac in a readable form.
Had to do this a few years ago with an old Mac IIci that was in storage and legally had to be powered up and files retrieved. That was fun.
I had to clean out my parent’s house last year and found a box of 5.25″ floppies from a Laser 128 (][c clone) and 3.5″ floppies from the ][ci / early PowerMac era.
The Laser turns on but doesn’t do anything and I don’t have my early Macs. Found this company over the weekend that claims to be able to pull data from old floppies –
I have an Apple branded external floppy drive. Bought it along with my Bondi blue iMac. Never used it. I wonder if it would still work with my old floppies. Does OSX even support drivers for the floppy drive any more?
You can still access 1.4 MB floppies without adding any drivers. I recently hooked up an old Imation external “super disk” (works with regular 1.4 MB and special 120 MB disks) to access some old floppies. Worked without a hitch.
I have no idea who made the computer in the above pic, but it doesn’t look like any IBM I’ve ever seen. It looks more like something which would’ve run good ol’ CP/M (the predecessor to MS-DOS).
I’d like to know what they mean by custom built. Supposedly it had a odd disk format which seems very weird to me. That’s a lot of work for really not much benefit.
“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”
Well, if anyone could afford to have someone build that complex a proprietary system for him, it would be Gene Roddenberry. 😉
I dabbled with CP/M a bit in the 80s. Unlike MS-DOS, or Win or Mac OS X nowadays, CP/M did NOT have a standardized disk format. Pretty much any computer model running it had a different disk format. Since they were all using the same 5.26 floppies at the time, theoretically you could read them on all other machines, but there was little automation. There were always disk formats that you needed to specify by hand, in detail. If you didn’t know what format the disk was in, it was a shitload of work.
Carnegie Mellon winter 1980. Deep in the bowels of what was then known as Science Hall. Got in through the steam tunnels late at night. We played command line Adventure on the terminals. Then we moved to the room with the Altos – multiplayer Star Trek with vector graphics!!! Played till dawn and snuck out before campus security came by. Those were the days. 🤓
That’s why I keep a scattered assortment of old Macs so I can recover just about anything in the entire Mac lifetime and then jump thru hoops to get it on a current Mac in a readable form.
Had to do this a few years ago with an old Mac IIci that was in storage and legally had to be powered up and files retrieved. That was fun.
I wish I still had my IIci. That was my first computer 😀
I had a 2cx can’t remember what I did with it now though I still have an old PowerMac G3 I haven’t fired up in years.
Take the floppies to any US nuclear missile silo and they can read them for you. (0_o)
I had to clean out my parent’s house last year and found a box of 5.25″ floppies from a Laser 128 (][c clone) and 3.5″ floppies from the ][ci / early PowerMac era.
The Laser turns on but doesn’t do anything and I don’t have my early Macs. Found this company over the weekend that claims to be able to pull data from old floppies –
http://www.retrofloppy.com
Anyone ever use them? Or other suggestions?
I have an Apple branded external floppy drive. Bought it along with my Bondi blue iMac. Never used it. I wonder if it would still work with my old floppies. Does OSX even support drivers for the floppy drive any more?
Yes, it should.
You can still access 1.4 MB floppies without adding any drivers. I recently hooked up an old Imation external “super disk” (works with regular 1.4 MB and special 120 MB disks) to access some old floppies. Worked without a hitch.
That’s not an IBM portable in the photo above.
Did anyone try to get a elf loopy reader from the Ferengi?
That is not the IBM portable you are looking for.
Old floppy
Too bad. I would have loved to see what was in those files. As I’m sure every sci-fi fan would. 🙂
Cool! Almost like time when Scotty was freed from the transporter. 🖖🏻
I have no idea who made the computer in the above pic, but it doesn’t look like any IBM I’ve ever seen. It looks more like something which would’ve run good ol’ CP/M (the predecessor to MS-DOS).
I found a similar computer on old-computers.com which was apparently made by a French company called ISTC:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1030
It was a custom built computer according to this link
http://news.yahoo.com/star-trek-creator-gene-roddenberry-lost-data-recovered-215131133.html?nf=1
I’d like to know what they mean by custom built. Supposedly it had a odd disk format which seems very weird to me. That’s a lot of work for really not much benefit.
“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”
Unless he wanted to have his own proprietary format so that, if someone did get the disks, they couldn’t get the files and steal his work.
Well, if anyone could afford to have someone build that complex a proprietary system for him, it would be Gene Roddenberry. 😉
I dabbled with CP/M a bit in the 80s. Unlike MS-DOS, or Win or Mac OS X nowadays, CP/M did NOT have a standardized disk format. Pretty much any computer model running it had a different disk format. Since they were all using the same 5.26 floppies at the time, theoretically you could read them on all other machines, but there was little automation. There were always disk formats that you needed to specify by hand, in detail. If you didn’t know what format the disk was in, it was a shitload of work.
This was one of the things contributing to CP/M’s failure, and to MS-DOS’s success.
Anyone remember playing Adventure or Wizardry on an }{c ? My first computer was a RadioShack TRS Model 3 with cassette drive and 16k ram. 🖖😀⌚️
Carnegie Mellon winter 1980. Deep in the bowels of what was then known as Science Hall. Got in through the steam tunnels late at night. We played command line Adventure on the terminals. Then we moved to the room with the Altos – multiplayer Star Trek with vector graphics!!! Played till dawn and snuck out before campus security came by. Those were the days. 🤓