Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry's Long Lost Works Recovered with DriveSavers

[btarunr]

DriveSavers, the worldwide leader in data recovery, eDiscovery and digital forensic services, formally announced today that the company has recovered nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator-the late Gene Roddenberry. The original Star Trek television program ran from 1966 to 1969. Roddenberry created scripts for the futuristic show on a typewriter. And later, he used a pair of custom-built computers to capture story ideas, write 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 on which the Star Trek creator stored his work. One of the custom-built computers had long since been auctioned and the remaining device was no longer functional. LunaTech, the IT company retained by Roddenberry Entertainment, suggested sending the disks to DriveSavers. "We've been working with DriveSavers for over 5 years," said Bobby Pappas, president and founder of LunaTech, "we knew if anyone could get this unique data back, they could."

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 was tedious work that took the better part of a year to finish.

After months of painstaking work to recover files that hadn't been seen in over 30 years, the question remained, what kind of data did DriveSavers unearth? The answer? "Documents," says Mike Cobb, DriveSavers director of engineering. "Lots of documents." As to the contents of the documents, Mike says, "2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, anything could happen, the world will have to wait and see."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

I loved watching Star Trek reruns. Back then, there wasnt much choice of local channels to watch and SOAPS were girly shows on 4 channels. So it was either Star Trek or Lawrence Welk on UHF channels or some other rerun.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I want more technical details about these floppies and the format of data they contained. I find it hard to believe that it took them a year to recover it. I mean we're talking 1980s tech.

 

[64K]

I loved watching Star Trek reruns. Back then, there wasnt much choice of local channels to watch and SOAPS were girly shows on 4 channels. So it was either Star Trek or Lawrence Welk on UHF channels or some other rerun.

Star Trek was a part of every Saturday morning for me in the late 60s early 70s. I've always liked Science Fiction.

Saturday evening I dodged the TV as much as possible. It was Lawrence Welk and then Hee Haw. What a combo from hell that was.

 

[The Quim Reaper]

Hope they don't find anything, err..embarrassing.

 

[Athlon2K15]

This reads like a commercial for drivesavers

 

[Octavean]

This reads like a commercial for drivesavers

Aye,...

That it does,...

 

[ZeppMan217]

This reads like a commercial for drivesavers

A cross-promotion between DriveSavers and Pramaount's new Star Trek movie. What a time to be alive!

 

[yogurt_21]

This reads like a commercial for drivesavers

yeah is it just me or is the whole thing of "the remaining machine was no longer functional" seem like bs? unless the thing was lit on fire it seems like a professional could have gotten it running.

as for time we could be talking about nontransferable file types. So once the machine was up and running you would need data entry people to manually transcribe the files into a modern format. I could see that taking a year.

so more than likely drivesavers got the remaining machine running in a short amount of time and then spent the rest transcribing the files.

since that doesn't sound as impressive they went with "it's dead Jim" in the story and made it sound like drivesavers used voodoo magic to read the floppies.

 

[H82LUZ73]

Well Well it could be the lost season 4/5 scripts of Star Trek ,who knows maybe get a new refreshed Star Trek show using the 4 th season story line ?

 

[newtekie1]

Maybe this will finally prove definitively that Picard was definitely better than Kirk.

 

[Steevo]

I want more technical details about these floppies and the format of data they contained. I find it hard to believe that it took them a year to recover it. I mean we're talking 1980s tech.

To make sure the byte encoding scheme was correct VS just random zeros and ones, on old floppies where its possible that the save of a large document was across multiple floppies, and or had invalid or uncommmon writes and identification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system

I could see it taking that long, I'm sure they made multiple copies of the disks, and may have had to write software to control the floppy drive to make a clean and complete 1:1 copy ignoring all formatting, then write software to parse the copies with different file systems, and software to index the data against all known ASCII encodings, big and little endian, and or do a search for the letter "E" or other common words to determine the structure of the data, then once they had an idea, reverse engineer the file structure, formatting and double check all their work, assemble the disks, and then turn it over before being allowed to talk about it.

So of the items are very serial, and cannot be made faster by more warm bodies, or more CPU power.

 

[Hood]

Well Well it could be the lost season 4/5 scripts of Star Trek ,who knows maybe get a new refreshed Star Trek show using the 4 th season story line ?

If these are like the 3rd season episodes, maybe they should have a digital "accident" and lose them...

 

[natr0n]

 

[anubis44]

This reads like a commercial for drivesavers

Granted, but there's a time and a place to give credit where credit is due, and this is one of them. These guys sound like they had to use quite a bit of creativity to salvage this data, and I for one commend them for their innovation and hard work.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

So once the machine was up and running you would need data entry people to manually transcribe the files into a modern format. I could see that taking a year.

The data is presumably stored on the medium digitally so all they would have needed is hardware to read the floppies (they said that took 3 months) and then write software to find and converting the files into a different format (I'd argue that shouldn't take more than a month). I've written software to do similar inside of two days. QuickBMS is designed specifically to expedite this process.

To make sure the byte encoding scheme was correct VS just random zeros and ones, on old floppies where its possible that the save of a large document was across multiple floppies, and or had invalid or uncommmon writes and identification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system

I could see it taking that long, I'm sure they made multiple copies of the disks, and may have had to write software to control the floppy drive to make a clean and complete 1:1 copy ignoring all formatting, then write software to parse the copies with different file systems, and software to index the data against all known ASCII encodings, big and little endian, and or do a search for the letter "E" or other common words to determine the structure of the data, then once they had an idea, reverse engineer the file structure, formatting and double check all their work, assemble the disks, and then turn it over before being allowed to talk about it.

So of the items are very serial, and cannot be made faster by more warm bodies, or more CPU power.

Adjusting bit encoding isn't all that difficult either once you figure out the arrangement.

Sure they can: create an image of each floppy. You're not going to copy data from one floppy to another for data recovery purposes.

I highly doubt it used FAT and ASCII.

They most likely returned the data on a CD and/or flash drive.

 

[Basard]

I wonder if they even tried just opening them with notepad.... LOL!

 

[Haytch]

Drive Savers just bit the bullet in my books.
5 years to data recover from 200 floppy's has to be one of the biggest IT jokes.

I think there was a very creative data recovery team involved that recovered the data in about 4 hours and spent the next 5 years getting paid to do absolutely nothing. This was the most likely scenario.

If the floppy's were readable, then this entire job should had been done in half a day. If the data was corrupted, maybe a month as a maximum.

I work at Payam Data Recovery in Melbourne, Australia and we have recovered data from over 100 floppy's that survived fires/extreme heat in under a week with corrupted data. We do all sorts of forensic data recovery work for the Federal Police all the time and we have never had a job too big for us to handle. In most cases, we are done within a day or two.

 

[red_stapler]

5 years to data recover from 200 floppy's has to be one of the biggest IT jokes.

I think the context of that was "drive savers has been recovering data for us for 5 years."

 

[Haytch]

"We've been working with DriveSavers for over 5 years," said Bobby Pappas, president and founder of LunaTech, "we knew if anyone could get this unique data back, they could."

I think you are correct red_stapler. I kind of quickly read the post and did not pick up on that. Thank you for bringing that to my attention, i guess it makes me feel a little better about the company, but still . . . . I agree with the previous posts that this is a marketing ploy. You don't see me running around posting that because of my data recovery skills, i assisted local authorities to bring down a bad bad person <--< Oh wait, i just did.

Payam, the place to go and recovery your lost porn!

 

[FordGT90Concept]

These were proprietary floppies too by the sounds of it; they aren't traditional.

 

[R-T-B]

These were proprietary floppies too by the sounds of it; they aren't traditional.

This. They weren't standard 5.25" disks. They probably had to read them via electron microscope or something.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

I'd sure like a more in-depth story about what they did, otherwise I would agree that is sounds like they spent a year playing Freecell.

The whole story about Custom-that or that is BS made up to sound important when its not. Then again not many people know that Commodore 128's were dual-boot (so to speak) machines.

 

[Haytch]

I know this is an old post, and i am sorry to bring it back up but . . .
I just wanted to state that we recently did a data recovery from 9x 5.25" floppy disks and a cassette tape for a customer that NEEDED to know what was on them.
The floppy disks had been subjected to extreme weather and one of them was smashed up pretty badly with several dints and some pin sized holes. The cassette tape was given to us without the cassette tapes plastic enclosure and it had clear indications that it possibly got drunk and set itself on fire or someone melted it by accident.
In the end, the data was recovered successfully across all 3 floppy disks and tape, only to discover that they were Commodore 64 games. One of the games was called 'Gunship 2000' and my boss decided to not charge the customer as long as he got to keep the 'Gunship 2000' game.

Yes, no custom built OS here, no encryption, but we did well
Oh, btw, it took us a little over 4 hours to extract all data and transfer it to another medium. My boss came in with his Commodore 64 the next day and verified that everything was working fine.
P.S. Gunship 2000 looks pathetic now, but i am sure it was elite back in its day.