History

A briefish history...

SPB is a multiplayer 3D text-based Star Trek simulation. These days, this may not seem like much, but in 1978, it was incredible. It allowed players from many different locations in Michigan’s Macomb County to connect and play a massive (at the time) multiplayer game. Up to 10 players could be flying a starship through space, searching for starbases and ships, and trying to destroy the same. Players could choose from Federation, Klingon or Romulan ships.

SPB was originally written by Douglas D. Dragin and F. Randall Farmer during their Sophomore year (1976/7) at Henry Ford II High School in Sterling Heights, Michigan. The two students wrote the game on a Hewlett-Packard HP2000 Access minicomputer at the Macomb Intermediate School District (MISD) that they had dial-in access for. MISD is a collective school resource for all the public schools in Macomb County, and at that time, it was the main computer resource for the students in Macomb County. Since the game was available at all of the schools in the county, many students from other schools began accessing and playing SPB. Before long, the players had friends from all across the county. Friendships that last to this day.

The original version of SPB was moved to a Mangnuson M80 mainframe (an IBM clone) at MISD, where it continued to bring students in the county together for years -- long after the original authors and players had moved on.

Both Doug Dragin & Randy Farmer soon got jobs at MISD, where they joined one of the SPB players, John DiGiantomasso. And other SPB players found themselves working there in some fashion -- Mark Faria, Howie Scheer, Mike Damas, Mike Reno, Kevin Collins and Matt Decker. Randy wrote programs for the Special Education department on a DEC PDP 11/34 running RSTS/E. He was joined here by Matt, and after hours, they began writing a new version of SPB to run on this system. This version, although finished and functional, was never really used. The PDP 11/34 was not a public access computer, so the player base was very limited.

After all the SPB players had left MISD, Matt Decker began a new version of SPB, written in C, based on the PDP 11/34 version. The original version was for an Amiga 1000 computer, and it could handle two players – one on the console, and another on a terminal off the serial port. Through the years, this version was made to work on a variety of computers. Usually with the number of players limited by the number of serial ports on the computer. Finally, in 1999, Matt added TCP/IP and Telnet support, and SPB was available over the internet.

There have been other versions of SPB written. Howie Scheer wrote a version for an Atari 800 microcomputer. John DiGiantomasso was given a copy of the original DEC PDP 11/34 version. He and his compatriots tested, modified and played this version, and then wrote a new version from scratch. It changed much of the gameplay but kept the spirit of the original intact.