Star Trek 79

And One Groovy Game from the Super 70s

Star Trek Game in Basic on a Burroughs Mainframe - Winter of 78/79

This was an epic winter in Chicagoland, with record snowfall and blizzards that gave Chicago a new Mayor, and it’s first black Mayor, Harold Washington. He was quite a character, and a good Mayor.

It was also around this time that my friends and I were pumping quarters into this new game at the bars and bowling alleys called Space Invaders, which was the beginning of a new era that my kids would grow up in through the 80s and beyond with electronic gaming. We had them all. I was never any good at any of them but sure did have fun with Mario and Cruisin’ USA on Nintendo and then Flight Sim, Sim City and Nascar Racing on very expensive PCs in the 90s.

Thats right, in 1994, $2400 got you a Dell with an Intel Pentium 60mhz CPU and Windows 3.1, a 14” heavy weight VGA CRT, 512mb hard drive, 3.5in floppy and I forget how little memory. A new Compaq biz class was $3500.

So just look at how good we have it now.

So anyway, I wrote this game in my spare time on the job as I was wrapping up classes at CLC during the day (dang English Comp, if they could only see me now) and working the 2nd shift Computer Operator job at night. I hadn’t looked at this in 30 years or more until I started putting this web site together.

The game is played “command line style” on a mainframe attached CRT terminal by cruising around the Galaxy in the Enterprise, seeking out Klingon Starbases along the way by scanning sectors and quadrants, using up energy in the process. When a starbase is located, you need to get the Enterprise in range and the proper heading and angle of attack before firing your photon torpedoes to destroy them, with or without the Enterprise Energy Shield up, which protects against counterattack but uses mega energy as the Klingon starbases fire back and then move around using random number generators. Fly out of the galaxy or run out of energy or weapons and the game is over. Destroy all 9 starbases and you win.

The code is contained in 5 separate modules that bounce back and forth, using simple CSV text files to pass data. 38 pages of green bar, 1900 lines of code. I was the only one to ever play it, and wasn’t done with it either. There are several places in the print out where I’ve noted some changes. I quit that job shortly after this was printed for a better paying daytime job that summer, before ending up back at the consulting company in Jan of 80. Glad I took this with me, and saved it.

As for the Basic language itself, which goes back to the early 60s, to think that Mr. Gates got his start with Microsoft Basic in 1975 and then built his empire upon that and more is pretty cool. Not sure about Jobs and Woz but I’d bet they got their start with Basic, too.

Years later (mostly in this century), I would go on to use Microsoft Visual Basic extensively for back-end systems utility programs.

Enough of that, it’s time to play Star Trek ‘79

Yes, please, I sure would sometimes, just get back jack, and do it again, instead of reelin’ in the years.

Thanks for stopping by.