Related: How The Captain Is Dead Adapted Its Star Trek Parody Board Game For PC In the year 1971, Star Trek The Original Series had been canceled for two years, and prototype desktop computers weren't quite refined enough to be household goods. Nascent computer programming subcultures generally congealed around computer science departments in colleges and universities, who published and shared their custom programs in professional journals and magazines. Much like today, some of these computer programmers also happened to be fans of science fiction narratives like Star Trek.
Klingon warbirds wound up inspiring spin-off starship simulators, early Rogue-like RPGs, and other PC games based around the exploration of randomly generated environments. As personal computers started to become a fixture of professional households in the 1970s and 1980s, this easy-to-install game of Federation starships vs. Before the Star Trek Bridge Crew, before the Starfleet Command series, before even tabletop RPG adaptations like Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game, there was a text-based starship simulator adaptation of Star Trek created in 1971, and it was designed to be playable on any computer system capable of running BASIC.