# Gene Roddenberry's old Floppy disks "might" have unseen scripts or series ideas.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [January 5, 2016, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269 "2016-01-05T21:49:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
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**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2016, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/1 "2016-01-05T21:49:21Z")

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Interesting news. 🙂 200 floppy disks could hold a lot of word processing documents. Perhaps 500 maybe? Back then a word doc might only be a couple hundred k bytes. Depended on how many pages it was. 5.25 floppies held 360kb. I still have a few boxes of my old ones and two drives that can read them.

I’m not sure why its taken DriveSavers 5 years. I had a program in the early 90’s called Disk Mechanic that had various tools to read non standard floppy disks. It bypassed the operating system and directly accessed the disc controller to read blocks of data. The hard part was taking that raw data and reassembling it into files. DriveSavers has experts at this sort of thing.

[https://www.yahoo.com/tech/floppy-disks-star-trek-creator-182855583.html](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/floppy-disks-star-trek-creator-182855583.html)

> [@](#):
>
> 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.

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**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2016, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/2 "2016-01-05T21:55:41Z")

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I’d love to hear that they found scripts for season 4 of the original series. That would be awesome.

fingers crossed. 😉

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**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2016, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/3 "2016-01-05T22:06:47Z")

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> [@aceplace57](#):
>
> I’d love to hear that they found scripts for season 4 of the original series. That would be awesome.
> 
> fingers crossed. 😉

I think some of the episodes of the animated Star Trek series had been adapted from scripts that were intended for season four. “More Tribbles, More Troubles” is one that comes to mind.

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**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/4 "2016-01-06T00:52:51Z")

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> [@aceplace57](#):
>
> I’m not sure why its taken DriveSavers 5 years. I had a program in the early 90’s called Disk Mechanic that had various tools to read non standard floppy disks. It bypassed the operating system and directly accessed the disc controller to read blocks of data. The hard part was taking that raw data and reassembling it into files. DriveSavers has experts at this sort of thing.

There could have been hardware limitations, too. There are certain types of floppies that your software would not have been able to read, since the disk itself had it’s data in a different size on the disk. (You know, kinda like the difference betweed DVDs and CDs, though not as extreme.) I remember specifically one type of Mac floppy that couldn’t be read by PCs–I think it was 800KB instead of the standard 720KB.

Plus these guys had to try to read the disks while avoiding any damage. So they probably took really high resolution scans of the disks and then worked completely digitally.

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**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/5 "2016-01-06T01:01:14Z")

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Given that Gene had basically walked away from TOS in the third season, after NBC moved it to the Friday at 10 p.m. death slot, I doubt very much we’ll see any proposed fourth season of TOS scripts.

There might be ideas for new series, but given some of the ones that DID get produced e.g. “Earth: Final Conflict,” I think I’ll still be able to sleep at night before I see these. :rolleyes:

Even “Andromeda”, the most successful post-TOS series he came up with, was basically TOS welded to his “Genesis II” idea that he made two unsuccessful tries at. The name of Andromeda’s protagonist, Dylan Hunt, is right out of G2.

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**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/gene-roddenberrys-old-floppy-disks-might-have-unseen-scripts-or-series-ideas/742269/6 "2016-01-06T01:59:28Z")

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At first I thought they were talking about an early word processor my dept’s boss used. It was a dedicated computer with 8 in floppy discs. He got it in the late 70’s and used that thing into the early 1990’s because he loved the Word Processor and was an expert in using it. I think it was a Wang?? Not sure. I only saw him using it.