Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by butterfi on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @10:28PM (#7557368)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by greenyoda on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @11:55PM (#7557580)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by Shivetya on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @05:40AM (#7558428)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by spudlyo on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @12:54AM (#7557714)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by fexl on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @12:07PM (#7560177)

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. :(

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by dhimes on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @09:04AM (#7558977)

I believe 'Hunt the Wumpus' was the first game I played, but quickly followed by star trek. And then 'Eliza.' Geez, takes me back.

Star Trek was great because you could really lose yourself in it for a while. It was the start of my horrible game addiction!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) by pohl on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @07:59AM (#7558758)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]