CNET: Floppy Disks of Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry Finally Yield Data

Originally published by CNET. 
Lost data—no, not the Star Trek character Data—has been found on floppy disks that belonged to Gene Roddenberry. Does this mean new adventures that take place in the final frontier?

Leave it to Gene Roddenberry to give us Star Trek fans hope for more sci-fi adventures long after he’s left this galaxy.

DriveSavers announced Monday that it recovered documents from 200 floppy disks used by the Star Trek creator, though no details of the documents’ contents have yet been revealed. Roddenberry created scripts for the futuristic ’60s show on a typewriter, but it is interesting to note that the 200 5.25-inch floppy disks paired with a custom-built computer Roddenberry later used to write show ideas and notes.

After Roddenberry died in 1991, his estate discovered the disks. But because the floppy disks were uniquely created for his computer, they couldn’t be easily read by ordinary tools. That’s where data recovery company DriveSavers came in.

The IT company retained by Roddenberry Entertainment, LunaTech, suggested sending the disks to DriveSavers.

“We’ve been working with DriveSavers for over five years,” Bobby Pappas, president and founder of LunaTech, said in a statement. “We knew if anyone could get this unique data back, they could.”

It took over three months for the DriveSavers team to develop software to read the customized disks, and it took over a year to then process all the information.

Of course, every fan (me included) wants to know what kind of data is on all those disks.

“2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek,” Mike Cobb, DriveSavers director of engineering, teased in a statement. “Anything could happen. The world will have to wait and see.”

Here’s hoping whatever was found on the disks will inspire the upcoming new Star Trek TV series set to debut on CNET parent company CBS in 2017. Perhaps we’ll finally learn what a season 4 of the original series would have looked like.