This is the first computer game I ever played. My mom was a secretary at a local university, and there was a computer lab across the hall from her office. I'd go there after school to wait for a ride home, and someone logged me in and set me on my way. This was all on paper-feed terminals and I'd take the stack of printout homes and read through each game over and over. This is when I fell in love with computers.
In the early nineties I decided to learn about unix, and this was the first game I played after setting my first BSD box up. This is when I fell in love with unix.
Thanks for the game, to the original programmer(s) to all the people who have kept it alive. This program is special to me.
This was also the first computer game I ever played! It was on an HP 2000 computer running timeshared BASIC from a clunky teletype, in the early 1970s. The best part was that you could just type "LIST" and it would print out all the BASIC code - all the games on that machine were open source!
If the Klingons beat you, you'd get this disheartening message, which I remember to this day: "The Enterprise has been destroyed. The Federation will be conquered. You are dead."
I also remember playing a car racing game on the same machine, and also a game about landing a spaceship on the moon (which, a few years later, I created a real-time version of on a 6800 microprocessor in machine language). But the Star Trek game was definitely the best one.
I remember all three, my father used to leave me at the console when he would take me to work on the weekends at IBM. Not sure that was system 3 or not.
Between that and reams of green bar to use at home for "artwork" I found my fascination with computers. Didn't hurt we had first generation IBM PCs and before then my father had about everything heath kit put out.
Wow, I also have fond memories of playing games on an HP 2000 running timeshared BASIC, except it was the mid 80s for me. A bit of Star Trek, but a lot of Angband, Advent, an ASCII first person rendered Dungeon crawl, and a ton of time spent on NOTES; a great message board ported from the Plato system.
I would skip school and hang out in the Terminal Room at the local college, playing games and writing programs. I never did finish High School, but I learned what I wanted to do when I grew up. Man I loved that machine.
Same here -- I played it in 1974 on an HP 2000F minicomputer via a teletype located in a converted janitor's closet at my high school.
The author mentions the lack of ability to renumber the lines in a BASIC program, but I'm quite sure there was a RENUM command that would do that.
In 1976 we got ADS (CRT) terminals in the computer lab, and once I figured out ESC-sequences, I had a shoot-em-up space ship game going. God I wish I still had the source code for that. :(
I have a similar relationship to this game. As kids, my brother and I would stop by the computer lab at Peru State College and, when lucky, someone would dial the line printer terminal into Omaha. The few printouts we accumulated were treasured artifacts.
In the early nineties I decided to learn about unix, and this was the first game I played after setting my first BSD box up. This is when I fell in love with unix.
Thanks for the game, to the original programmer(s) to all the people who have kept it alive. This program is special to me.