Gene Roddenberry’s Estate – Star Trek

February 25, 2022
Michelle West
Case Studies

Gene Roddenberry’s Estate - Star Trek

Client:
Gene Roddenberry’s Estate

Device Type:
Legacy Computer System

Turn Around:
Enormous Amount of Time *

Profession:
Television Program Producer, Screenwriter

Location:
Santa Monica, California

Going Where No Data Recovery Lab Has Gone Before

Gene Roddenberry, the man who masterminded the popular show Star Trek, passed away in 1991. It wasn’t until much later that his estate sent DriveSavers nearly 200, 5.25-inch floppy disks on which the Star Trek creator’s work was stored.

Problem

The “Star Trek” creator floppy discs could not be read on any commercially available computer and software.

Nearly 200 5.25-inch floppy disks from the late 60’s, used on custom-built computers with custom-built operating systems and a special word processing software that prevented any modern method of reading what was on the disks, were sent to DriveSavers for Data Recovery.

Solution

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.

Summary

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 remains, what was actually on the disks? Lost episodes of Star Trek? The secret script for a new show? Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

Well, that’s confidential.

When DriverSavers was contracted to recover the data, we were also bound by rules of confidentiality. PCWorld and other media reached out to the Roddenberry estate but was told it had no comment on the data or its plans for the newly discovered writing of Gene Roddenberry.

*DriveSavers Standard Turnaround times are 1-2 Business days, Economy 5-7 Business days, and Priority 24/7 service – on occasion, unique substances require more time and are approved by the customer.