But, on occasion, I often wondered about the Star Trek text game.
#STAR TREK WARP SPEED CALCULATOR POINT TO POINT HOW TO#
I couldn’t figure out how to play it.īy the time I entered high school, I had graduated from BASIC and moved on to bigger and better things like C and C++. "How the heck is this Star Trek?" I remember thinking. I recall loading it up a few times, but each time I ended up staring at the screen in utter confusion. It motivated you to learn to code and to tweak or even improve the programs you were entering in.Įvery BASIC game book that I picked up contained some version of the Star Trek game. It was a pain in the ass, but the process encouraged you to tinker. Meaning, you had to type them in to play the games. Back then, computer books and magazines distributed programs in printed form. I remember encountering versions of the game back in the early 80s when I was a little kid trying to learn BASIC on my IBM PCjr. From there, early computer enthusiasts enhanced and rewrote the game for every flavor of mini and microcomputer BASIC imaginable and beyond. Soon after Mike ported his game to HP BASIC, it entered the public domain. Two years after the original series was canceled in 1969, high school senior Mike Mayfield was busy keeping the Star Trek universe alive by feeding punched paper tape into a Sigma 7 in an effort to bring the crew of the Enterprise and the Klingon Empire to life on a 10 character-per-second teletype terminal.