+<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; on 1972 he rewrote it in Hewlett
+Packard BASIC.</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.</para>
+
+<para>Many different versions radiated from Mayfield's original; most
+are descended from a version misleadingly called SPACEWR that David
+Ahl published in <citetitle>101 BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>,
+1973. This was a port of Mayfield's version obtained from the HP
+Contributed Programs library.</para>
+
+<para>Our "Super Star Trek" came through a Taurus BASIC program by
+Grady Hicks dated 5 April 1973. This does not appear to have been
+derived from Ahl's SPACEWR, at least not directly. 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.</para>
+
+<para>Dave Matuszek, Paul Reynolds et. al. at UT Austin translated the
+Hicks port into FORTRAN and considerably enhanced it. The name "Super
+Star Trek" and many design features (including command abbreviations
+rather than command numbers) were probably picked up from a second
+BASIC version published by David Ahl in his 1978 sequel
+<citetitle>BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>.</para>
+
+<para>One signature trait of FORTRAN SST and its descendants is that
+the sectors are 10x10 (rather than the 8x8 in Mike Mayfield's 1972
+original and its BASIC descendants) Also, you set courses and firing
+directions with rectangular rather than polar coordinates. FORTRAN SST
+also preserves the original numbered quadrants rather than the
+astronomically-named quadrants introduced in David Ahl's 1978 BASIC
+version and descendants.</para>
+
+<para>Eric Allman's BSD Trek game is one of these, also descended from
+FORTRAN SST via translation to C. However, the mainline SST (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>
+