Origins In 1971, Mike Mayfield, then in his final year of high school, frequented a computer lab at the
University of California, Irvine, while teaching himself how to program. The lab operated both a
SDS Sigma 7 and a
DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer. The PDP-10 hosted a copy of
Spacewar!, a multiplayer space combat video game developed in 1962 in the
early history of video games. Mayfield had gained illicit access to the Sigma 7 at the lab and wanted to create his own version of the game for the system.
Spacewar! required a
vector graphics display, however, and the Sigma 7 only had access to a non-graphical
Teletype Model 33 ASR
teleprinter. Mayfield decided to create a game in the vein of
Spacewar! that could be played on a teleprinter and brainstormed several ideas with his friends. As none of the group had much experience with computers, most of the ideas were infeasible, but one concept he liked and thought was possible was a game based on
Star Trek, then in syndication on television. The concept included the game printing a map of the galaxy and a map of the local star system, and phaser weapons whose attack power declined over distance. Mayfield began to program the game, creating a
punched tape of the game at the end of each programming session and loading it back into the computer the next day. He worked on the game through the rest of the school year and into the summer after graduating.
Port to HP Later that summer, Mayfield purchased an
HP-35 calculator and often visited the local
Hewlett-Packard sales office. The staff there offered to let him use the
HP 2000C minicomputer at the office if he would create a version of his
Star Trek game for it. The
HP Time-Shared BASIC dialect these machines ran was different enough from Sigma 7 BASIC that he elected to abandon the Sigma 7 version and rewrite the program from scratch. He completed it on October 20, 1972, and the game was added to the HP public domain Contributed Program library of software as
STTR1 in February 1973, with Mayfield attributing the game to Centerline Engineering, a company he was considering starting. It was later published in the
People's Computer Company newsletter, and republished in their book
What to Do After You Hit Return (1975), a collection of HP BASIC programs.
Port to DEC David H. Ahl was an employee in the education department of
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He had begun the
Edu newsletter where user-submitted games became a major draw. He and fellow employee Mary Cole
ported STTR1 to DEC BASIC in the summer of 1973, with some additions, and published this version in the newsletter. Ahl attributed the game to "Mike Mayfield of Centerline Engineering and/or Custom Data". In late 1973, Ahl collected many of the game submissions in the book
101 BASIC Computer Games, containing descriptions and the
source code for many
early mainframe games.
101 BASIC Computer Games was a landmark title in computer games programming, and was a best-selling title with more than 10,000 copies sold. As such, the BASIC ports of mainframe computer games included in the book were often more long-lived than their original versions or other mainframe computer games. He included
Star Trek in the book under the name
SPACWR, i.e.
Space War.
Super Star Trek In early 1974, Bob Leedom saw Ahl's version of the game in
101 BASIC Computer Games while working with a
Data General Nova 800 minicomputer at
Westinghouse Electric Corporation and, having never seen a
Star Trek game before, started porting it to the system. After he got the game running, he began to expand it with suggestions from his friends. He changed the user interface, replacing the original game's numeric codes with three-letter commands and adding status reports from show characters and names for the galaxy quadrants, and overhauled the gameplay, adding moving Klingon ships, navigation and fire control options, and an expanded library computer. Once it was completed, he wrote a letter to the People's Computer Company newsletter describing the game. Ahl, who by then had left DEC to start
Creative Computing magazine, saw Leedom's description in the newsletter and contacted him to publish the game in his magazine. Ahl ported it to
Microsoft BASIC and published the source code of the game as
Super Star Trek to distinguish it from the original
Star Trek game, calling it "by far the best" version. He later included it under that name in the 1976 anthology
The Best of Creative Computing as well as the 1978 edition of
101 BASIC Computer Games, retitled
BASIC Computer Games. He added a note that he had permission from the rights holders to use the show's name in the title alongside a longer note written by Leedom explaining why the galaxy had 64 quadrants even though the term suggested there should only be four.
BASIC Computer Games was the first million-selling computer book, giving Leedom's version a much wider audience than Mayfield and Ahl's original versions. ==Reception and legacy==