Tech Times: Gene Roddenberry ‘Star Trek’ Secrets Decrypted From 200 Floppy Discs After 30 Years

Originally published by Tech Times.

Months of painstaking work has finally come to fruition when the contents of almost 200 discs owned by Gene Rodenberry finally been decrypted. While no actual information about it has been released, DriveSavers did hint at “Star Trek.”

The discs were discovered in Rodenberry’s estate years ago after the “Star Trek” creator passed away. Since then, the estate sent those discs to DriveSavers, the data recovery company that LunaTech of Roddenberry Entertainment had suggested.

The “Star Trek” creator truly wanted to keep the secrets of the universe – or at least the universe he created – a secret because the retrieved floppy discs could never be read on any commercially available computer and software.

They will only work with the computer that was specially designed for Rodenberry. The personalized machine even runs on a custom-made operating system and has its own word processing software.

We’ve been working with DriveSavers for over five years … we knew if anyone could get this unique data back, they could,LunaTech President and Founder Bobby Pappas

In spite of the years of experience at recovering data, decrypting the Roddenberry floppy discs was not an easy task for DriveSavers. Engineers worked on developing software that could read the discs and it took three months before they succeeded at it.
The next time-consuming task for them was to actually read the nearly 200 discs and recover everything they could from them. That work alone kept DriveSavers engineers busy for nearly a year.

What DriveSavers engineers recovered from the 5.25-inch floppy discs were documents – a lot of them. The company is keeping mum about the contents of those documents, but DriveSavers Director for Engineering Mike Cobb gave a big clue Trekkies might get excited about.

2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original ‘Star Trek,’ anything could happen, the world will have to wait and see.LunaTech President and Founder Bobby Pappas

It might just be possible that all those floppies contained “Star Trek” related files since the custom-built computer was where Roddenberry typed up notes and ideas for the show after he moved on from his typewriter.

Read more at:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/131258/20160206/gene-roddenberry-star-trek-secrets-decrypted-from-200-floppy-discs-after-30-years.htm