+<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.</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 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 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 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
+version of the Hicks port he played had a habit of throwing long
+quotes from Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found
+intolerable at 110 baud.) The Austinites 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.</para>
+
+<para>The name "Super Star Trek" and many design features may have
+been picked up from a descendant of SPACEWR, reworked by Robert Leedom
+and friends and published by David Ahl in his 1978 sequel
+<citetitle>BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>. On the other hand, 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, and this was apparently before 1978.</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
+FORTRAN Star Trek via translation to C. However, the mainline S (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>
+