+<sect1><title>Origins</title>
+
+<para>The original Star Trek seems to have been written by Mike
+Mayfield at the beginning of the 1970s. His first version was in
+BASIC for a Sigma 7 in 1971; in 1972 he rewrote it in Hewlett Packard
+BASIC. The source is <ulink
+url="&sst-site;www/historic/mayfield.basic">available</ulink> on the
+SST2K website. In January 1975 it became part of the DECUS library
+under the name <ulink
+url='http://www.trailing-edge.com/~shoppa/decus/110174.html'>SPACWR</ulink>.</para>
+
+<para>While some people claim to have recollections of playing Trek
+games in the late 1960s, the earlier ones seem actually to have been
+variants of
+<ulink url='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!'>
+SPACEWAR</ulink>, the earlier space-combat game on the
+PDP-1. Mayfield <ulink
+url='http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/star_trek.html'>wrote
+in 2000</ulink> that he invented the Trek-style galactic grid, and the
+evidence seems to back that up. Some of the confusion probably stems
+from the fact that Mayfield's original and several early descendants
+were distributed under the name SPACWR.</para>
+
+<para>Many different versions radiated from Mayfield's original; most
+og the ones in BASIC are descended from a SPACWR version that David
+Ahl published in <citetitle>101 BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>,
+July 1973. This was a port of Mayfield's version obtained from the HP
+Contributed Programs library. </para>
+
+<para>Our SST2K is descended from a Taurus BASIC program by Grady
+Hicks dated 5 April 1973. This does not appear to have been derived
+from Ahl's SPACWR. The header says "GENERAL IDEA STOLEN FROM
+PENN. U.", and the game has several features not present in SPACEWR:
+notably, the Death Ray, ramming, and the Klingon summons to surrender.
+And, of course, it predates Ahl's book. The source is <ulink
+url="&sst-site;www/historic/UT-Trek.basic">available</ulink> on the
+SST2K website.</para>
+
+<para>Dave Matuszek, Paul Reynolds et. al. at UT Austin played the
+Hicks version on a CDC6600, but disliked the long load time and
+extreme slowness of the BASIC program. (David Matuszek notes that the
+Hicks version he played had a habit of throwing long
+quotes from Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found
+intolerable on a TTY at 110 baud. It must, therefore, have been
+rather longer than the one we have.) The Austin crew proceeded to
+write their own Trek game, loosely based on the Hicks version, in
+CDC6600 FORTRAN. At that time, it was just called "Star Trek"; the
+"Super" was added by later developers. In the rest of this history
+we'll call it the "UT FORTRAN" version.</para>
+
+<para>At the time the UT FORTRAN source was last translated to C it emitted
+the message "Latest update-21 Sept 78". Thus, it actually predated
+(and may have influenced) the best-known BASIC version, the "Super
+Star Trek" published by David Ahl in his November 1978 sequel
+<citetitle>BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>.</para>
+
+<para>This 1978 "Super Star Trek" had been reworked by Robert Leedom and
+friends from (according to Leedom) Mayfield's HP port. There is
+internal evidence to suggest that at least some features of Leedom's
+SST may have derived from the UT FORTRAN version. In particular, Dave
+Matuszek recalls implementing command words to replace the original
+numeric command codes, a feature Leedom's SST also had but the
+1973 and 1975 SPACWRs did not.</para>
+
+<para>One signature trait of the UT FORTRAN game and its descendants
+is that the sectors are 10x10 (rather than the 8x8 in Mike Mayfield's
+1972 original and its BASIC descendants). The UT FORTRAN version also
+preserves the original numbered quadrants rather than the
+astronomically-named quadrants introduced in Ahl's SST and its
+descendants.</para>
+
+<!-- Dave thinks his Fortran Star Trek used the clockface for quadrant -->
+<!-- navigation. -->
+
+<para>Eric Allman's BSD Trek game is one of these, also descended from
+the UT FORTRAN version via translation to C. However, the mainline version
+(now SST2K) has had a lot more stuff folded into it over the years
+— deep space probes, dilithium mining, the Tholian Web, and so
+forth.</para>
+</sect1>
+