Robert Leedom spent his career working as a radar systems engineer for aircraft at Westinghouse, but in the 1970s he developed computer game programs on the side. He is perhaps best known for Super Star Trek, the enhanced version of Mike Mayfield’s 1971 Star Trek computer game that was published in Creative Computing and the book BASIC Computer Games. He also developed Baseball and KIM-Venture for the KIM-1 computer, and he discusses both in this interview as well, conducted May 29, 2021. I have also included some comments from David Ahl at the conclusion of this page where he discusses Super Star Trek from his perspective as well.
Bob: How’s your project going?
Kevin: It’s going pretty well. I’ve talked to a lot of the other folks who were involved in some capacity, went through a lot of rabbit holes [unintelligible 00:01:37].
Bob: You talked to Mike Mayfield and Dave Ahl, that’s so cool.
Kevin: Yes, David Ahl’s still up in, I think, New Jersey.
Bob: Well, I met him– I sort of met him, if met is the right word. Of course, back in those days there was no internet, so everything had to be done by mail or by newsletters that circulated around. There was a company out in Menlo Park, California called the People’s Computer Company. They had a storefront that they had funding for and they just set up computers in there and said, “This is free. Who wants to come in and play with computers?” They were trying to introduce them to people. This is in the very early ’70s. I don’t know how in the hell I heard about them, but they published a newsletter.
Well, it’s more like it was a newspaper, People’s Computer Company newspaper. Somehow, David and I made contact through that and then when I wrote to– After I’d done all this work on Super Star Trek, sent [chuckles]—I was going to say sent him a listing, but I also sent back in those days, we used a teletype. So I sent in a paper tape with punched holes in it which had the listing that allows you to put the game into your own computer. That’s how we found them.
Kevin: I think I actually came across the original letter in the People’s Computer Company. That’s how [crosstalk]
Bob: Somewhere around here [crosstalk]
Kevin: That was really cool. I wanted to actually ask how you got into computers in the first place, because it was a such niche at the time.
Bob: Oh, how I did?
Kevin: Yes.
Bob: Well, I was interested in computers in high school, which– Let’s see, ancient history now, that would’ve been in the early ’60s. I built an analog computer for one of the– I don’t know, one of the science days that they had there, because digital computers were horribly complicated and very expensive, and nobody was ever going to have enough money to build this at this time.
Then, when I was in college, I went to Johns Hopkins, then I was introduced to the era of computers where you could do your chemistry homework on the computer, but to do that, you had to get the program written and then entered onto punched cards, if you’re familiar with the punch cards, the IBM cards. You would send in, you would submit, as they said, that deck of cards to the computer lab, and then the next day you would come back for your listing, to see what had run. If it was just one page long, you said, “Oh, darn it. I know what happened.”
Sure, enough it would say, “You left out a comma,” or something annoying like that. Anyway, that was computers in college. Then, after I got out of college and went to work at Westinghouse, I found that computers were all around me. It was fantastic because you could get a timeshare account, which meant that some major computer somewhere you could log on with your Westinghouse account and play with it that way. That’s how I got started with it, and then eventually people that I was working with were also messing around with computers.
My first exposure to really doing actual cool work on a computer was for radar systems. I was a radar systems engineer at Westinghouse. We made radars for fighter planes, for fighter jets, the F-16 and F-22, the two major programs I worked on. Anyway, we were doing real-time programming. Do you understand the term, real-time programming? A lot of people don’t really follow what that means.
Kevin: I’ve got a pretty good idea.
Bob: It just meant that from moment to moment, you were computing based on the roll, the pitch, and yaw of the aircraft, and the target data–the target tracking information–that you had, where the antenna had to point to keep tracking the target, so as the pilot’s moving around you got to do a fair amount of sophisticated math to figure out where you should still be pointing the antenna to keep tracking the target. There’s no messing around, you had to have that program operating. It has to do the computation and come back with the answer, and send the antenna command out within 10 milliseconds or else you’re not pointing in the right place in the sky.
At the time, computers still ran at–let me think about this–I don’t think they were running at a megahertz then, they were running slower than that, because I remember it took three milliseconds to do an add, so it was pretty tricky, to take shortcuts and figure out how it will let you do things fast enough for this computer to work. That was pretty cool stuff. That was my day job. Then at night, there was a computer in the back room. It was a Data General Nova, I remember, that anyone could go and work on, to do simulations or what it is you wanted to.
That was about the time I discovered David Ahl’s 101 BASIC Games and I thought “I could type in those.” Of course, the listings were horribly long [unintelligible 00:07:40] crashed. I got it all typed in and I thought, “I bet I could jazz this up.” That was my computer education back at that time. Aside from my day job, this was stuff– When you’re playing with computers, you end up saying, “I wonder if I could do this?” and that’s where you learn.
That’s how I got involved in modifying Super Star Trek to do all the cool things. Of course, I would have friends come to the lab after hours and play it, and they would say, “How come it does so-and-so? Why doesn’t it do such-and-such?” And oh geez, well, I guess I could add that. Two days later, they would come back and I would have that added and they would want something else, so it just ballooned like crazy. It was quite a bit larger than the original Mike Mayfield game, I think, but that’s how.
Kevin: That’s feature creep for you, I guess. [laughs]
Bob: Absolutely, that is correct.
Kevin: Did you keep track of any other computer periodicals at that time, either through work or just for fun?
Bob: Yes, it was mostly for fun. The computer periodicals at the time weren’t doing the sort of stuff that I was doing at work, real-time programming was just not a thing that you could go read about. We felt like we were pushing the envelope. We were learning as we went and not from anyone else, we were learning stuff, we had to make things work on the airplane. What was I going to say? You were talking about other periodicals. I was working with– Oh, I lost my train of thought. I had no other computer at home, of course, so everything I had to do was after hours at work.
There was no other computer game that was available to us, other than what we wrote ourselves, because there was no way to easily distribute them. Until the day somebody came in and said, “You got to come up to this lab and look at this.” I sat down and they started the program and it said, “You are in a forest at the end of a stream.” It’s a blinking cursor, so what do I do? He said, “Whatever you want.” It was the first Adventure game and it was mind blowing, that was the coolest thing because you could pick anything you wanted and the computer would have some answer. Actually, that’s when I got involved in computer games to the point that eventually I decided I didn’t enjoy playing computer games because I knew too much about what was going on behind the scenes.
Dumb stuff would happen to you and I would go, “Why did they choose that? Some programmer came up with that.” I became a programmer and non-player of computer games not long after that.
Kevin: How did he come across the Adventure game?
Bob: Somebody in the office, something happened. I have no idea because, as I say, there was no way to send it around. You couldn’t email it to anybody. Email did not exist. The internet didn’t exist, so somebody had gone somewhere and brought back a floppy disk with it on it. I do not know where that came from, but it just showed up and no one knew where it came from. Nobody I knew knew where it came from anyway.
Kevin: That’s bloody wild.
Bob: It was wild and a few years after that, I can’t remember what year, was this in the ’80s maybe? No, it was before the Mac came out. I got a Mac not too long–I know I had an Apple II for a while and, let’s see, somewhere in there–I know when it was, before the Apple II came out, I got my boss to send me to some computer class that was going to teach us about microprocessors. It was a microprocessing class.
Out of that class, which Westinghouse paid for me to go there, I ended up just coming home with not only the notes, but also a single board computer of my own that was called the KIM-1 and we used the 6502 chip in it. That was assembly language programming and now that was the first computer that I had of my own here in my house and I played with that for a long time and I wrote some pretty cool computer games for that which I could tell you about.
In fact, I am in the process of getting that on the Internet Archive right now as I thought it would be a shame if that disappeared, but the KIM-1 was, as I said, based on 6502 and at the time all sorts of computers were coming out. That was when the Altair came out, you know about the Altair?
Kevin: Yes.
Bob: The Altair PC? Was that a yes, or no?
Kevin: Yes, I actually got to mess with one at a Vintage Computer Festival a couple of years ago.
Bob: Very cool. Yes, so that one was on the cover of Popular Electronics, it was the first computer that you could get and build at home. The Altair came out and then the PET and the Commodore 64. Gosh, what others came out? I can’t remember all of the other names. The Apple was one of those and I was trying to figure out what I should buy for myself and, of course, you didn’t know which ones of these things were going to succeed and which ones were not, but I finally decided on the Apple because the Apple II used the 6502, which I was familiar with because that was the one that I ended up with in the computer course.
That began my lifelong connection to Apple. I’m a Mac guy now and I’ve been “Apple-ing” ever since then. The KIM-1 computer, that single board computer I came home with, had 1,188 bytes, 8-bit bytes of memory. In those 1,188 bytes, you had to do whatever you were going to do and the odd number is because part of that– It was 1,024, but if you used the memory that was used for the stack and you used the other end of the stack and you didn’t bump into anything in the operating system that was in the top of the stack, you could use those memory locations as well.
For the KIM-1, I wrote what I called KIM-Venture and it was an adventure game with 26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over [for user expansion].
Kevin: That’s really cool.
Bob: It was cool and that’s what I’m currently archiving, I found a place that was interested in archiving old computer stuff and so I sent them the listing and am trying to get a binary that someone with an emulator can run–or see if they can get it to.
Kevin: That’d be really cool to check out once they get that up there.
Bob: When and if, yes. [laughs]
Kevin: I definitely want to ask you more about some of the other stuff you worked on, but jumping back to Star Trek real quick, how familiar were you with the TV show?
Bob: Very much so. We watched it for the three short years it was on. We watched–that was while I was in college if I recall it [ed. note: 1966-1969] I think were the original series and we would watch it at the fraternity house. After that, it went into just a basic cult following for a while and I was not a heavy Trekkie, but I did follow them. I was interested in it and I did go to a Star Trek convention once with my friends, but I knew the show pretty well.
By that time, reruns were starting and I was able to see the whole series. I’ve seen every episode at least seven times like I guess most Star Trek fans.
Kevin: Yes, I mean that’s still one of the only Star Trek shows my wife likes to re-watch.
Bob: I didn’t follow the subsequent seasons really very much at all–I mean, The Next Generation, and then the various spin-offs and things, those I didn’t follow very much.
Kevin: You came across the original listing in the 101 Basic book?
Bob: Yes.
Kevin: I guess real quick, what did you think about the programs in that book just in general and I guess Star Trek in particular?
Bob: Well, in general many of them I’d already seen through the People’s Computer Company newspaper that I’d told you about. A bunch of them were familiar from there, but then the Star Trek one, I said, “This is a cool program which is a lot more involved than guessing your number, or finding the Hurkle and which cave he’s in.” The rest of them all seemed pretty simple and not involving compared to the Star Trek one and being a Star Trek fan and seeing this huge listing in there, I thought, “Well that’ll be a challenge to get all of that in and working.”
Of course, no two versions of BASIC are the same, so anything you do, you’re going to discover that your random number generator doesn’t work the same way theirs does, the PRINT command is slightly different and this one has an ON…GOTO and the other one you have to build your GOTO and sub-routine jumps yourself. It was fun learning the differences between what was in the book and what the version of BASIC that our Data General programs used. I remember what I was going to tell you. After having it published in David Ahl’s book BASIC Computer Games, you recall that I had my address in there and I began getting letters.
I guess I got letters for a good 10 to 15 years after that as this book made its way around the world and I would get letters from 10- and 12-year-old kids clearly written on a piece of notebook paper: “Dear Mr. Leedom, I can’t get Line 1470 to work. I have an XYZ computer, how can I fix it so that it works on mine?” Or, “Dear Mr. Leedom, your program doesn’t work at all. Tell me how to fix it. I have a so-and-so computer.” Of course these were versions of computers that I didn’t have or have access to, but I ended up having correspondence with people literally all over the world, England, South America, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, Canada, and of course, a bunch in the United States. In a lot of cases, there would be multiple rounds of correspondence as I tried to help them with their problems. My advice usually was, “You know what? This is a great learning experience. Why don’t you try things and see what works, and figure out yourself how to change it?” I would give them suggestions if they give me a specific question. But again, since I did not have their version of the language, I couldn’t tell them exactly how theirs worked. I had some conversations or some correspondences that’s gone on for years with these [chuckles] people who just ran across the book in a bookstore.
Kevin: [laughs] Right up to today, it seems.
Bob: Yes [laughs]. I was shocked to discover in my mail today yet another Super Star Trek letter.
[laughter]Kevin: It’s funny and it’s actually part of my project. I actually have a friend who can read Japanese translate the article I found in an old Japanese computer magazine about it, and they talk about your version of the game and they’re like, oh, wow.
Bob: No kidding. That is cool [laughs].
Kevin: It got everywhere. When you were doing your modifications, you talked a bit about how your friends were helping you sort out changes. What were you looking for when you were editing that program? How did you feel it could be made better?
Bob: It’s hard to remember. Kevin, that was 45 plus years ago [chuckles]. I seem to recall that the commands were one through nine and I wanted to make them more memorable. Long range scan, LRS, and short range scan, SRS, and computer was COM, and then the computer would give you some options of things it can do for you. A great deal of it involved a lot of string manipulation so that people can put in words and commands that were easily related to what they really wanted to do instead of just numbers one to nine. Everybody’s complaining about the quadrants. “How come there are 64 quadrants?”
Kevin: [laughs].
Bob: “Quadrant means four, there’s only four quadrants!” I went off and — You have the book, you’ve seen the writeup on the quadrant nomenclature?
Kevin: Yes.
Bob: That was me, I came up with that whole thing to set them up [laughs]. You must put a star name for each four quadrants of the 64 quadrants and the standard cartesian notation for the galaxy. That was part of it. Basically, people would complain, why can’t I do so and so? I would go off and try to figure out how to let them do that, responses, rather than so much of what– Initially, I did the basic version, added a couple of things that I wanted, but I cannot tell you anymore how many of the things were things that I thought of, and how many of them were things that people wanted, that I came up with a way to do that. That’s lost to me now [laughs].
Kevin: That’s fair. You did make a game that’s certainly more user friendly, having played a bunch of these recently.
Bob: [Laughs] Of course, the other thing that it’s hard for people now to realize is, there was no such thing as computer graphics, everything was in text. When Pong first came out by Atari, which is kind of based on Spacewar! which– Have you read the Hacker’s Dictionary, by the way? I don’t know why I happened to think about that. They were talking about the MIT–
Kevin: Railroad Club?
Bob: Model Railroad Club, right. That’s where a lot of the lore of computer hacking–which didn’t have the bad connotation it does now–came from.
Kevin: I know some stuff about Spacewar! [chuckles].
Bob: Yes. That was S-P-A-C-W-R. It was only six letters allowed in the names at that point. That was the first graphics computer game that I know about. Since Star Trek was developed for just about anything that we all have access to, it’s all [text]. What can you do with text to emulate graphics? That’s where we came up with the scanning and the printouts of where the stars and the Enterprise and starbases were.
Kevin: Yeah, I get it. It might be on like a teletype or something that can’t have graphics.
Bob: In fact, I’m sure that there were people playing on teletype, which meant they had to do a long paper listing thing and you were fortunate to have a green screen with text on it so that we send some pop up immediately instead of waiting for the teletype to print out the scan screen.
Kevin: Oh yes, those things that can be interminable [laughs].
Bob: Yes.
Kevin: What sort of–what was sort of your thought process, you learned about this game getting spread all over the place from this book?
Bob: It was kinda cool because it was fun to–mostly kids–talk to the kids. I would have been 30 at that point and yet I’m getting notes from kids who want to get into computers and I have made that happen, because they’re playing the game that I–well, I didn’t write it exactly, but–that I modified and made public. It was just fun to think that I might be influencing and helping kids get into the field.
Kevin: Did you have any other interactions with David Ahl beyond your correspondence about getting it in the book?
Bob: No, I didn’t. I don’t think I ever talked to him. I might have talked him on the phone once or twice possibly. Maybe…I can’t remember. I know I never had any contact with Mike Mayfield though. I can’t put you in touch with both of them.
Kevin: [laughs].
Bob: If you’re still in touch with Dave Ahl, you might ask him about People’s Computer Company and see if he remembers that outfit in Menlo Park, California. That’s where I first really got excited.
Kevin: When I emailed him, he mentioned it a bit. I didn’t really follow up with him though. You mentioned that you worked on some other games like KIM-Venture. Could you tell us a bit more about some of them?
Bob: Again, I don’t know how much you want to hear about the KIM computer. Again, it’s all I had for the longest time before I got my Apple II. The KIM had six 7-segment LEDs, that was the display. The cool thing was that the computer if you dug into it, and you bypass some of the– what do you call them now, entry points that are publicized so you could get to them…I can’t remember the term for that. [ed. note: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)]
Kevin: I’m blanking.
Bob: Yes, I am too. The information that came with the KIM allowed you to dig into the operating system, basically, and enter it at places where you didn’t just display six characters on the display, you could actually turn on and off each segment of each of the six 7-segment LEDs separately. This meant that you could have blinking segments up there, you could have symbols, you could do things other than just put numbers up there, six hexadecimal characters.
As a result, I wrote a game called Hexpawn–I say I wrote it, I can’t claim to have written it from scratch because that was something that was published in Scientific American—Hexpawn was a game where you had a three-by-three board, and you had three pawns, and the other guy had three pawns, and each of you took turns advancing and you could capture them. The idea was to try to be the last one standing. I wrote one that saved the result of each of the moves that the computer made and if the computer lost, it would go, “Okay, I’m not going to make that move anymore”, and there are only a very small number of moves, unlike chess or checkers, a three-by-three board’s pretty simple. Basically, the computer remembered all the losing moves and didn’t make them anymore. After you played it a dozen or so games, it could never lose anymore. That was kind of a cool little game to go into the KIM. That was the first one that I had published in the KIM-1 User Notes, another newsletter [that was] going around, published by a guy named Eric Rehnke.
Eric and I had some communications about things so he published that game for me. Then the next one that I did that was really slick I thought, was a baseball game. You would have a pitcher in the left-hand segments and the batter in the right-hand segments. It’s a two-player game and I made a little peripheral, one was a pill bottle with a button on the end of it and the other was a shampoo bottle with a dial and another button so you can dial up what kind of pitch you want and the little segment will go zipping across the screen, and it will either go fast or slow.
It will drop or sink, go up or sink so you can have different kinds of pitches. Then the other player would have to push his button on the pill bottle at a certain time to bat successfully. It was sort of like a mini videogame.
Kevin: Very inventive.
Bob: That was KIM Baseball. So, Eric published that in his User Notes and that’s when I got really ambitious and started working on KIM-Venture. By the way, there were no assemblers, at least I didn’t own an assembler back at this time. All of this was in machine language, and hand-assembled, and I created…I had messages in there…you know, on a 7-segment LED display, you can’t make a K or a W– there’s several letters that are just too complicated to put up there. I could make an S, I can make a lowercase N. There was a KIM alphabet of a certain number of letters that you could fake, if you will, on the display, but only six letters at a time. That was the communication with the user to explain where they were. You can write the word…let’s see… f-o-r-e-s-t. You can write “you” (the letter U), and then “are” (the letter R), and then “in”, so “U R IN”, and then the display would change to the word “FOREST”. That’s how you would navigate through the KIM-Venture–the semi–Colossal Cave, I called it.
Kevin: [chuckles]
Bob: Which was similar to the way you played Adventure but on a much smaller scale. That one I got published again. No, no, that didn’t. Did they publish that? I can’t remember. That would have been such a huge listing. I don’t think Eric got that published in his magazine, I mean, in his newsletter. I ended up finding a company locally who would print it for me, and I actually sold the cassette version of KIM-Venture at–there was a Computer Faire, I think it’s spelled as f-a-i-r-e, and there were faires on the west coast in San Francisco and there was computer faire in Atlantic City, New Jersey. That’s the computer faire, 1978, something like that. I went there with a T-shirt, which I still have, that says, “Ask me about KIM-Venture.”
Kevin: [chuckles]
Bob: I was selling my KIM-Venture cassette for $25. I think I probably sold a couple of dozen of them. That was it!
Oh, that brings me to something else because there was also a computer club in Washington DC, which is a pretty good hike for me to get down there but nevertheless I would go down to the computer club in DC once a month and I took my KIM-Venture games out there and they thought it was cool as hell. One guy bought a copy of it. Next month, everybody was talking about how much fun it was to play because that guy, of course, had just made copies for all his friends.
Kevin: [chuckles] That hurts.
Bob: That is when I realized how deeply I felt about piracy of computer games because I had been victimized myself.
Kevin: [chuckles] That is unfortunate. [chuckles]
Bob: Yes, so I decided right then I did not want to be in the computer publishing, computer game writing, and distributing myself, and ever since then, I’ve always railed against, not “railed”, that’s a little bit too strong, but I just refuse to rip off people because certainly, jailbreaking computer games was a thing by people once the internet was rampant. I just didn’t think was right because it had been done to me.
Kevin: Yes, that’s perfectly fair [chuckles]. After that, what sort of work did you do?
Bob: You mean, what was my work-work? My real work?
Kevin: Yes, real work in like anything else you did with computers and games and that sort of thing on the side?
Bob: Oh, I did do- I did some with the Apple II, once that came after the KIM. I did and of course at that time had some skill in assembly language programming. At that time, the computer system was still simple enough that I could get in there and mess around with the guts of what was going on, and I wrote some computer games that were text games but had some machine language stuff on top of the BASIC language that came with the Apple. Let’s see, what with the Apple am I thinking of? Oh, I know, I thought of one, I had a game that I wrote–not exactly a game. Oh, one of my hobbies is magic, I’m a member of the Society of American Magicians. At the time, there was a contest in our local club, an originality contest. I thought, “Well, I haven’t been in magic long enough compared to these guys. There’s nothing I can do that’s original. Wait a minute, these guys haven’t seen computers before.” This was in the very early 80s, like ’81. I was one of the very few people that had a computer at home at the time. So, I wrote a computer game where the computer apparently read your mind and guessed the card that you were thinking of.
I started out as, for my entry into the originality contest, I showed up as a computer technician. I got a white coat. I explained how we had a mind-reading component in this computer, and the computer would ask me questions. I would ask the guy if he had a card selected and he would tell me what it was then the computer would guess. Is it a red card? Is it a Diamond? Is it a seven? The computer was always correct because I was the one entering yes or no into the keyboard, but I was intercepting the letters so that when I was sitting there typing, I could type y-e-N, for no. It would appear on the screen as y-e-s that always looks like y-e-s on the screen.
I can be one ahead of the questions that the computer was asking and give it the answer to the next question that was the probably be whether black, whether it was high or low, whether is it heart or a diamond, things like that. That was one of my favorite computer games that I wrote that looked like a mind-reading game.
Kevin: That’s really fun. Is that also one you have that you’ve got hanging around with you that want to put online.
Bob: I’m sorry what’s the question?
Kevin: I was going to ask, is that another one that you have found hanging around that you want to put online?
Bob: That I did want to put out?
Kevin: We’re talking about putting like KIM-Venture up on Archive. I wondered if that was another one that you were–
Bob: Oh, no, that was for the Apple II and I no longer have an Apple II, and that program is long gone, but I won the originality contest that year, so I have trophy for that. [chuckles]
Kevin: That’s pretty cool. [chuckles]
Bob: But no. KIM-Venture, I just thought that was unique and something that should be saved because that, I thought was the ultimate amount of stuff that could be crammed into 1,188 bytes of a single board computer and it needed to live.
Kevin: Yes. I mean, that’s really pushing what you can do with KIM.
Bob: Yes. So, I wrote some stuff for the Apple II, and I don’t think I had anything memorable. Nothing that I wanted to distribute anywhere, although I belonged to the computer club in Washington, DC for the Apple, which was called Washington Apple Pi, P-I. Went to those meetings for a lot of years and exchanged utility programs with people, things like that, people had discovered ways to do things and we would publish them in the local newsletter. Then I graduated to a Mac, and I’ve done some Mac programming, not a great deal. I’m mostly a computer user now.
Kevin: Did you keep working on like radar systems and that sort of thing? During the day?
Bob: Oh yes, that was my career. I designed radar systems for fighter jets, F-16, F-22, a little bit on the F-35, a few overseas programs where we put our Westinghouse (which then eventually became Northrop Grumman) radar into other airplanes around the world, and yeah. So that was my entire career, airborne fighter fire control radar.
Kevin: That’s really cool.
Bob: It was a pretty good career–I had a great time. I retired a few years ago. I like playing tennis every day but not as much as designing radar systems.
Kevin: You know what, that’s good. You’ll get some fresh air, get some exercise. Well, thank you very much.
Bonus materials:
Leedom’s KIM-Venture materials and a compiled binary can be found here: http://retro.hansotten.nl/6502-sbc/kim-1-manuals-and-software/kim-1-software/kim-venture/
Similarly, KIM Baseball has been dug up by Leedom and is available here: http://retro.hansotten.nl/6502-sbc/kim-1-manuals-and-software/kim-1-software/baseball/
As part of my research into Star Trek, I contacted David Ahl, who had this to say about including both it and Super Star Trek in BASIC Computer Games (reprinted here with his permission):
I’m not sure of the exact order of things but I believe the Star Trek game was originally submitted to the HP user library by Mike Mayfield of Centerline Engineering on his own. Somehow, either Mike or someone else also submitted it to DECUS at DEC. Back in the late 60s and early 70s, DECUS was not highly organized; it was almost like a volunteer organization within DEC. My Education Product Group was always looking for programs to give our customers and we probably used DECUS submissions more than many other product lines. Mary Cole was in my group at the time and she along with two other guys (Leo Laverdure and Ira Potel) and me modified the program to work on RSTS-11 BASIC rather than HP 2000C BASIC for which it was originally written. When I included it in the first 101 BASIC Computer Games book published by DEC in 1973, it had the name SPACWR (Space War), so as not to infringe on the Star Trek name. Even in DEC’s third printing (1975) of the book, that was eventually sold through DECUS, it was still named SPACWR.
I left DEC in July 1974, started Creative Computing magazine in October 1974, and a few years later started reprinting material from Creative and looking for other material to publish in book form. The games book was an obvious candidate. After I left DEC, the new (stodgy) manager of the Education Group thought games were silly, which is how the games book fell into the hands of DECUS. That worked to my advantage, however, because they were happy to give me permission to reprint it with one small change and one large change. The small change was the title, which could no longer include “101,” so it simply became “Basic Computer Games.” The second change, which actually I asked for, was that all the games be converted to Microsoft BASIC (which, at DEC, was RSTS-11 BASIC). A third change was that we no longer were restricted to DEC’s 6-character program names (a limitation of several PDP-8 versions of BASIC) so I gave most of the programs more meaningful names. Including, of course, SPACWR, which was now called Star Trek. Fortunately, I had met Gene Roddenberry and with a few kind words from him, we got permission from Paramount Pictures Corp to use the name (with no fee!).
Since the game in one form or other was in both the HP and DEC user libraries and since HP and DEC between them essentially owned the education market, the game wound up on virtually every school and college computer in the country. Adding to its spread, “Basic Computer Games,” initially published by Creative Computing in 1978, became the first million-selling computer book a few years later. So essentially, the game was now in the public domain and everyone was welcome to it either by typing it in or getting a copy from someone else. Admittedly, the game still had a few bugs and a great guy, Bob Leedom, attacked them and produced a revised corrected version in April 1974. Oops, not quite everything was corrected and he produced a “final” corrected version in December 1974.
We published Leedom’s RSTS-11 corrected version as Super Star Trek in the 4th issue of Creative Computing, May/June 1975. At the time, the BASIC that MITS was selling for the Altair computer, (later to become Microsoft BASIC) was a close (but not exact) copy of RSTS-11 BASIC. So, boy did we start getting letters: it doesn’t work, I get an error message at line 5960, what does DIMX$(2), X0$(5) mean?, my computer doesn’t have the CHAIN command, etc. I could easily have assigned someone full time to simply deal with the cards and letters, many of which came with pages and pages of printout. I took it quite seriously for a while, not wanting to have published a program with errors, but after some deep and lengthy analysis, we determined that a 926-line program with about 30,000 typed characters was bound to lead to typos and entry errors. The small differences between Microsoft BASIC and RSTS-11 BASIC were quite minor and were generally not responsible for the problems people had. But another much larger problem also reared its head: guess what, Commodore PET BASIC, and Radio Shack TRS-80 BASIC, and Shelbi BASIC, and TI 99/4 BASIC, and Apple BASIC had some major differences with Microsoft and RSTS-11 BASIC. So our version of Super Star Trek just wouldn’t run on those machines without some modifications. Which many people made, and published, and distributed. Over the years, the majority of programs of all kinds that we published in Creative Computing were in “standard” Microsoft BASIC and we encouraged readers to learn the differences between the different versions and convert the programs to whatever they had. We viewed this as a good learning experience.
At Creative Computing, we considered producing working versions of Super Star Trek for all the major personal computers and selling them through our software division, Sensational Software. However, by 1979, most games programs were beginning to use graphics rather than just text, so it looked to us like Super Star Trek had run the course and wouldn’t justify the production and promotional investment required to bring it to market. That was probably the right decision because our big sellers were all heavy on graphics like Super Invasion, Breakout, and Air Traffic Controller.