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Gene Roddenberry's Floppy Disks

I saw it. It is an interesting story even if Drivesavers does seem to exaggerate the challenges involved.

Having the old computer running would not get data from deleted space, nor slack space, nor the damaged parts of the disk.
 
They were CP/M floppies. The Roddenberry folks have been doing this on and off for quite some time. The Drivesavers people are very nice to work with.
 
I glean from the article that the "unknown brand" computer was able to run both DOS and CP/M. This would suggest that it is some kind of PC clone, and it looks hand-made. I saw IBM sleeves and maybe even an IBM branded Tandon TM100-2 or 2A in the machine. So it is likely that Roddenberry was using CP/M-86 and some version of WordStar to memoralize his ideas during the pre-DOS period. Did CP/M-based WordStar save text with standard ASCII? It is easy enough to generate a human readable file from that.
 
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CP/M (and, for that matter DOS) WordStar saves text in pretty much human-readable form, no matter the platform. In document mode, the high-order bit of each byte demarcates word beginnings, "soft-" and "hard--" spaces, carriage returns, etc. If you need convincing, grab any old Wordstar document file and use Vern Buerg's LIST utility to look at the file in 7 bit character mode.
 
I cannot let this sentence pass without comment :

According to Cobb, the majority of the disks were 1980s-era 5.25-inch double-density disks capable of storing a whopping 160KB—that's kilobytes—or about one-tenth the capacity you can get on a $1 USB thumb drive today.
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The disks are capable of storing 360KB without any extraordinary effort, and could by the time PC-DOS 2.0 was released in 1983. Also, I doubt anyone would pay $1 for a 1.6MB USB thumb drive today. Its more like one-ten thousandth of the capacity of a 1-2GB $1 USB Thumb Drive today. There are reasons why I rarely bother with PCWorld, and this is one of them.
 
Great Hierophant said:
I cannot let this sentence pass without comment :



The disks are capable of storing 360KB without any extraordinary effort, and could by the time PC-DOS 2.0 was released in 1983. Also, I doubt anyone would pay $1 for a 1.6MB USB thumb drive today. Its more like one-ten thousandth of the capacity of a 1-2GB $1 USB Thumb Drive today. There are reasons why I rarely bother with PCWorld, and this is one of them.
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Single sided drives lasted a long time. Dedicated word processors often had smaller floppy capacities than the hardware would suggest. The 80s were strange time for computing.

I suspect the line actually referred to the collective capacity of all the floppy disks combined (32MB to 80MB if any later disks or flippies were in the set) compared to a typical flash drive which around here is about 512MB per dollar list.
 
wesleyfurr said:
Seems to me like it might have been easier to try to get the old computer working! Though I guess even then you have to figure out how to transfer the data...
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Most of these sorts of CP/M machines used FM or MFM encoded floppy disks, which makes it easy enough to read in the raw bits using a Kryoflux, SuperCard Pro, or even a PC with a good FDC. The hard part would probably be extracting files from the file system, since every CP/M vendor customized the sector and file system layout. If the files were for WordStar, that was a very common format and there are many tool for importing those in to other word processors.

[Edit: I only meant, as a reply to the OP, that in general cases on general machines one _might_ not need working original hardware if one already had the right drive and analysis hardware. Although it certainly could help, especially if the hardware was exceptionally weird - which, from the sound of it, may have been the case here. I didn't mean to trivialize anything]

What I find rather disappointing is that even tech sites are treating "floppy disks" like they were technology used with the vacuum tube based computers embedded in Model-T cars like those driven by Abraham Lincoln and his pet T-Rex. :p And, of course, we are all required to hate floppies because they are ooooolllllddd.
 
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SomeGuy said:
Most of these sorts of CP/M machines used FM or MFM encoded floppy disks, which makes it easy enough to read in the raw bits using a Kryoflux, SuperCard Pro, or even a PC with a good FDC. The hard part would probably be extracting files from the file system, since every CP/M vendor customized the sector and file system layout. If the files were for WordStar, that was a very common format and there are many tool for importing those in to other word processors.
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Ah, so you have first-hand knowledge of the Roddenberry disks? I never would have guessed.
 
No, that is just a wild guess. I did say "most" CP/M machines and "probably". For all I know they used a controller that encoded the bits using magic gnomes that only speak a secret language, disks that spin at a rate determined by a pseudo random number, and a word processor that internally stores everything in Klingon.

And yes, Chuck, I heard they sent those disks to YOU. :cool:
 
SomeGuy said:
For all I know they used a controller that encoded the bits using magic gnomes that only speak a secret language, disks that spin at a rate determined by a pseudo random number, and a word processor that internally stores everything in Klingon.
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I'm still semi-anxiously awaiting the delivery of my "new" NorthStar Horizon but from all the research I've done on it so far it's my understanding that this sentence is pretty much a perfect description of how the NorthStar disk controller works. ;)
 
It could have been worse. They could've been hired to translate the Questor Tapes. It was the only relevant Roddenberry reference I could think of.
 
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