blastr: Vast New Trove of Gene Roddenberry Data Opened—But what’s in it?

Originally published by blastr.

The late Star Trek creator left behind untold numbers of documents that may give us a glimpse into the workings of that show and perhaps more.

According to The Wrap, the story begins sometime in the late ’60s, when Roddenberry wrote scripts for the original Star Trek on your basic typewriter. At some point, he began working on teleplays, story ideas and other information on two custom-built computers, storing the files on floppy disks (remember those?). Although Roddenberry eventually switched to more modern computers, he kept the two custom machines and those disks — some 200 of them.

Flash forward to the present, years after Roddenberry died in 1991, and his family has rediscovered the archive of floppy disks — but with one of the two computers long since sold off and the other no longer working, no way to access the specially formatted disks that were generated by those custom operating systems and special word processing software.
Enter a company called DriveSavers, whose engineers worked for more than three months to develop a way to extract the data from the disks, without any sort of user manual or technical info to guide them. Once they figured that out, it took most of a year to read the data on the disks. And what was on them?

“Lots of documents,” said DriveSavers director of engineering Mike Cobb in a press release, adding, “2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, anything could happen, the world will have to wait and see.”

Hmmm … so what could be in there? Ideas for new Star Trek stories or series? Never-used concepts for the original show or Star Trek: The Next Generation? With Star Trek Beyond coming out this summer in theaters and a new TV series arriving from CBS in 2017, is it possible that even more Star Trek could surface — from the mind of the man who launched the whole thing in the first place?