Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s words freed from old floppy disks

“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.