Timeline

1973 - 1974 There is a historical backstory behind Decwar's Romulan, stretching back to the 1974 UTCC CDC 6600 Fortran Star Trek single-player code created by Dave Matuszek. At that time, there were many variants of the single-player BASIC Star Trek game, with a rapidly expanding zoo of improvements and unique curiosities across all of the versions. Dave was able to introduce something very special into his Fortran version: a threatening computer-controlled adversary that would intermittently raise the tension level for the human player. This was almost certainly the genesis of what would become the Romulan in Decwar, likely transmitted by Robert Schneider across the gap between 1974 and 1978. In the 1974 code, Dave named the threat The Thing. Simply replace The Thing with Romulan, and the idea is clear. Notably, Decwar’s text SCAN map used the same ? mark to represent the Romulan as Dave's SCAN map used to represent the The Thing. Dave had played the UTCC CDC 6600 BASIC version, and explains that it had a bad habit of throwing long quotes from Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found intolerable on a 110 baud terminal. Dave also explains that UTCC staff hated the BASIC version because of its performance issues.

1978 - 1982 UTCC DEC-10 people are creating Decwar, building on the Fortran Star Trek single-player and two-player code that was created on the CDC 6600 from 1973 onwards. They're usually working in the offices around the DEC-10, in the HRC building on campus, right beside the Drag, Dobie, etc.

1983 - 1998 The game is exploited by CompuServe (CIS). In the first months as a commercial CIS game, it's called Decwars (with an "s", instead of Decwar). This period lasts roughly six months to a year. It's pure Decwar, no real changes, fast, responsive, and thrilling. This is the source code we have today. In our project utexas reconstruction we're actively removing the small CIS additions to the code. They're glaring and obvious, related to selling things to players, so it's not a real issue. Soon, it's rebranded as MegaWars and intentionally slowed down. CIS charged by the minute, enough said. With MegaWars, all Star Trek names are removed to dodge lawsuits, this is 1984, maybe as early as late 83. Later, MegaWars III is even slower and more time consuming. By that point the original UT Decwar was a rather distant ancestor.

1995 All through the nineties, people are searching for the code on the Internet, primarily via USENET newsgroups. In 1995, a mystery person sends the very early CIS codebase and environment to Harris, attached to a mystery email. The complete original UTCC tape contents are in there, including even the original letter from UT to CIS. Things are all jumbled together and it takes research and patience to disentangle. We've done that in the project utexas reconstruction. The code is from 1982 and 1983. It's a snapshot from the months immediately after the UT tape arrived at CIS, while CIS was still working on getting the code working in their environment. UT code was not changed, CIS was only adding a few commercial things and getting everything working. Our theory is that the mystery person carefully preserved a tape containing this early snapshot when they realized what was coming, and because they knew that it would become historic later, when the real, serious, major CIS changes kicked in. They are a hero for doing that! Decwar was an immediate hit and sensation on CIS, and the mystery person was wise enough to understand what that meant and took action. This was well before the MegaWars era. There is even debugging style output showing the state of the CIS DEC-10s, almost certainly reflecting the period when CIS was getting the game working within their commercial environment. Their primary concern was bringing in paying customers to their special dedicated DEC-10 and charging those customers by the minute. The expert on this period is Merlyn. Merlyn very likely knows more about the CIS period than anyone except the actual CIS employees and contractors.

2011 The code from the mystery 1995 email became publicly available from the UT Austin Briscoe Center archive and on GitHub in Merlyn's Decwar repo. At that point, Merlyn did intense work to deactivate CIS specific customer billing and network control code so the code builds and runs on a standard SIMH PDP-10. He commented all of the changes and has mentioned going as far as actively using DDT, a DEC debugger from the sixties. Merlyn discovered the crucial fact that a DEC F66 Fortran complier is necessary, FORTRAN-10 V6 in particular. That was the heroic phase of the archaeology and Merlyn's accomplishments are legendary.

2024 PiDP-10 front panel reconstruction is released thanks to efforts of Oscar, Lars, and RichC. This naturally leads to many new things.

So, long history. Three central names forming the essential historical skeleton for UTCC. 

• Dave Matuszek 73-74
• Robert Schneider 74-82, the bridge from the CDC 6600 era to the DEC-10 era. That's Robert to the left in the picture above.
• Bob Hysick 78-82. Bob is working at the terminal in the picture up at the top.