Star Trek is a text-based computer game that puts the player in command of the USS Enterprise on a mission to hunt down and destroy an invading fleet of Klingon warships. It was developed out of a brainstorming session between Mike Mayfield and several high school friends in 1971. The original Star Trek television show had only recently ended its run and was still extremely popular. Mayfield and his “geek friends” wrote down a number of ideas for a game, and during the summer holidays he then started incorporating as many of them as he could on an SDS Sigma 7, using an illicitly borrowed account at the University of California, Irvine.

Later that summer Mayfield purchased an HP-35 calculator and often visited the local Hewlett-Packard sales office looking for help using it. They mentioned that they would give him time on their HP 2000C time-sharing computer system if he would port his Star Trek game to it, an offer he readily accepted. HP later started distributing this version of the game as “STTR1” on their Contributed Program tape library.

David H. Ahl worked in DEC’s education department, and as a hobby he collected BASIC games and distributed them in a newsletter for DEC users (DECUS). He found Mayfield’s HP2000C version, ported it to DEC BASIC-PLUS and sent it out in the newsletter. This version rapidly proliferated through the large DEC community of the early 1970s. He later collected many of the DECUS games into a book, 101 BASIC Games, calling the DEC version SPACWR (as in Space War).