Trek73

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Trek73 is a computer simulation of space ship battles based on the original Star Trek television series. It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee. The game was played via teletype. Roderick Perkins adapted the program for the LHS DECISION computer located at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California. Dave Pare and Chris Williams translated the BASIC into C and Jeff Okamoto, Peter Yee, and others corrected and enhanced the code.

[edit] History

In January 1973, William K. Char began programming a space battle game in BASIC on a Hewlett-Packard 2000C system at Wilson High School in San Francisco. The first version of what was then called $SPACE was introduced in May 1973. In June of 1973, Char, Perry, Lee, and Gee started programming TREK73; it was completed October 8, 1973. Roderick Perkins^[1] adapted TREK73 for the DECISION computer at the Lawrence Hall of Science in 1974. Dave Pare and Chris Williams at the University of California, Berkeley independently translated TREK73 into C in 1984. In April 1985, Jeff Okamoto and Peter Yee combined the Pare and Williams versions into one.

[edit] Commands

The Lawrence Hall of Science version of Trek73 was played on Teletype printing terminals such as this one.

Each turn, the player entered one of more than two dozen commands via teletype. (The Lawrence Hall of Science version had a few more commands than the original version.)

1. Fire Phasers
2. Fire Photon Torpedos
3. Lock Phasers Onto Target
4. Lock Tubes Onto Target
5. Manually Rotate Phasers
6. Manually Rotate Tubes
7. *Phaser Status
8. *Tube Status
9. Load/Unload Torpedo Tubes
10. Launch Antimatter Probe
11. Probe Control (Detonate, Redirect, Lock)
12. *Position Report
13. *Position Display
14. Pursue An Enemy Vessel
15. Run From An Enemy Vessel
16. Manually Change Course And Speed
17. *Damage Report
18. Scan Enemy (Damage Report Of Enemy)
19. Alter Power Distribution
20. Jettison Engineering
21. Detonate Engineering
22. Alter Torpedo And Phaser Firing Parameters
23. Attempt Defenseless Ruse
24. Attempt Corbomite Bluff(s)
25. Surrender
26. Ask Enemy to Surrender
27. Initiate Self-Destruct Sequence
28. Abort Self-Destruct
29. *Survivors Report
30. *Print Version Number
31. *Reprints Above List

(*Does Not Use A Turn)

Each turn represents two seconds of simulation time.

[edit] See also

• Begin (computer game)
• Star Trek (script game)
• Star Trek (text game)
• Star Trek games

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Early Star Trek Games
• TREK73 Basic Source Code
• Trek73 DOS Version
• Free BSD Version
• Trek73 Page