Gene Roddenberry and Susan Sackett in front of a Lexoriter “computer.” If you look close enough you can see the printer to the right of Sackett and the traditional box of 5.25-inch floppy disks.įor the most part, Roddenberry’s “computer” was mostly a glorified typewriter, but he put it to good use filling those 200 missing disks. One thing Sackett is certain of, though: how much RAM the computers had, because Roddenberry would brag about the whopping 64K.

Its maker, Luxor Corp., appears defunct, but the similarities with the chassis used for the CP/M-based Blackhawk Computer System that Edwards thought it was makes me wonder whether Luxor didn’t just source its chassis from Blackhawk. It was touted as being able to interface with the popular electric typewriters of the period. The machine itself, from what I can tell from a 1982 edition of Computerworld, had a Zilog Z-80 processor, two floppies, and the Luxor WP software on a ROM chip. The disks would be handed back and forth via the classic Sneakernet of the early ’80s. Sackett said the pair cost about $6,000 to $7,000 and one sat on her desk with a daisywheel printer (later upgraded to a dot-matrix) while the other sat on Roddenberry’s.

Gene Roddenberry’s long-time executive assistant Susan Sackett has a good laugh in front of one of the Lexoriter computers the Star Trek creator used. “Later, we added an external modem so we could dial up and chat with other people, but I don’t remember much about that.” Susan Sackett ” didn’t do anything else-it was used strictly for writing and saving work on disks,” Sackett told PCWorld.

Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry