Floppy recovery

[Ethan Dicks]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 4:24 PM, Lyle Bickley <lbickley at bickleywest.com> wrote:
> I'm somewhat familiar with the Roddenberry floppies. They were not in a
> standard format - so it was not just a matter of reading the floppies,
> but developing software to read the specially formatted and encoded
> floppies (understanding directories, files, etc.) and converting them
> to files in a format their client could use.

Since the article in PC world mentioned that most of the floppies were
"in CP/M format", and I know there are many possible ways to make flux
transitions on spinning rust, I totally get that it can take some time
to figure out where the actual bits are on the medium, but once you
have the data portion of the sectors on a modern machine, CP/M wasn't
all that complicated, and IIRC, files were on sequential blocks once
they started (not scattered about such as with most modern
filesystems), knowing that you were starting with something based on
CP/M, what was so obscure that it took months to untangle that part?

-ethan