How Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s words were freed from old floppy disks

As the data recovery firm couldn't get Roddenberry's old computer to power on, it had to sleuth the physical layout of the tracks on the disk. That alone took three months to reverse engineer; Cobb credits his own "Scotty," Jim Wilhelmsen, with figuring it out.

Cobb said when the operating system files were excluded, about 2-3MB of data was recovered from the 200 floppies. That may seem like a minuscule amount by today's standards, but in the 1980s, document files were small. Roddenberry's lost words were substantial.

PCWorld 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.