About

This is the blog of the DecwarOrg collaboration. The Org formed spontaneously in 2025 as part of a broader surge of interest in the history, restoration, preservation, and archiving of Historical Computing, especially historical computing associated with UT Austin and the UT Austin Computation Center. The explanation for the Org's name traces back to the innovative computing culture at UT Austin. The UTCC was formed in 1958, and computing at UT became more noticeable in the early seventies with the growth of the Computer Science Department. Other important focuses of interest are computing in the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department, the Center for Space Research, the Astronomy Department, and McDonald Observatory. In the seventies, a curious sign of the times was a flourishing of recreational world-building at UTCC, with a family of mainframe-based Star Trek games evolving between 1973 and 1982. Decwar was the culmination, and it left a life-long mark on many of its players. The legacy of computing at UT Austin is explored here through the lens of these pioneering creative works that still have the power to cast their spell and bring people together today.

The Org's objectives include historical research, restoration, preservation, archiving, and outreach to carry forward the story of computing at UT Austin and the UTCC, and particularly the long, surprising, and thought-provoking story of Decwar itself. We aim to do that by not only making it possible for people to experience the game, but also the DEC-10 environment that made it possible, the actual Assembly and Fortran code, the tools such as TOPS-10, TECO, and RUNOFF used to create it, and by bringing together the voices and tales of as many of the original UT Austin people as possible. At the same time, we're bringing the latest technologies to bear and building a future where AI can bring to life the sights and sounds of eighteen players battling across the galaxy in an intense Decwar tournament back in 1982. We are preserving a moment when computing was taking the modern form familiar today, but in the earliest dawn light, when purity and comprehensibility were at their peak. We believe there's no better way to experience the roots of computing than Assembly and Fortran programming on the DEC-10, and we're preserving that pioneering frontier spirit for the future.

Website  https://decwar.org 
YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/@decwarorg 
GitHub   https://github.com/decwarorg 
Email    noahhsmith@utexas.edu