From: The Forkliftguy [forkliftguy@forkliftguy.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 5:40 PM
To: tw2002@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [tw2002] History of Trade Wars
Since everyone is freaking out, and I claim to be an expert on this (heck I was playing and hacking when a lot of this went on), here's what happened. Sometime back in the late 50's some programmers at MIT developed a game called "Spacewar". It was run on a mini-computer, and the first game controllers (joysticks) were developed for this game. Many space games were written for mini's and mainframes during the 60's and 70's, however the release of the Apple II made microcomputers popular. Several space games were developed for microcomputers using various operating systems. I have copies of several of these antique games, mostly in IBM format, if anyone wants to look at them. Trade Wars is the ancestor of these games. I have been told that there was a game written for a Hewlett Packard microcomputer running CP/M that is the direct ancestor. I have never seen this game, and no one I know of has seen it, so it's existence is conjectural. In the early 80's RBBS became a popular BBS package. John Morris, a hobby programmer decided to do a space game for RBBS, and the first Trade Wars was born. It had a 100 sector universe, and was extremely primitive by today's standards, however it would run on an 4.7 mhx IBM PC with 256K of ram, and not eat up a lot of hard drive space. It became very popular and gradually Morris added more enhancements, including larger universes (200 sectors, then 500, and then 1000), as well as an alien race, the Cabal. Up to this point the source code was included with game distributions. In the middle 80's John gave up on further development of the game, and passed the torch to Chris Sherrick, who proceeded to make changes. The source code was no longer included in the archives, the game was made compatible with other BBS systems, and it was renamed Trade Wars 2. About the time Sherrick took over development a gifted programmer named Alan Davenport downloaded a copy that included source code. Alan was sure he could do a better job, and proceeded to market his own distribution, which he called Yankee Traders. While TW2 and Yankee Traders were similar, the flavor was quite different, and YT became popular too. Also about this time a sysop in Texas who ran WWIV under the name of "Lord Darkseid" tried to get Trade Wars running on his system (note that I have seen Lord Darkseid categorized as a "Warez Puppy", without a shred of proof. I suspect the use of aliases may be responsible for this. WWIV was often categorized as a Warez type board because most boards used aliases). The effort to get Trade Wars running was an unqualified disaster. Several programmers attempted to figure out Morris's source code, however they were unsuccessful, so they wrote their own version of Trade Wars using Pascal, and called it Trade Wars 2001. It spread quickly among the WWIV boards (it wouldn't run with any other type of BBS software), and included a source code distribution. A programmer in Florida who was running WWIV liked the game. He liked it so much he called it Trade Wars V, Galactic Armageddon, and supported it for several years. I was in contact with him at one point about 10 years ago, he had dropped the project by then, and was quite surprised to hear that I was still interested in it. In about the same time Gary Martin (AKA The Dungeon Master) was running a WWIV board called "Castle Ravenloft". Gary had heard that the Texas group had no intention of taking Trade Wars any further, and there were some bugs he wanted to kill. The last release of Trade Wars 2001 (V3) was Gary's first release. With Trade Wars still extremely popular Gary decided to rewrite the game, adding a bunch of features, such as support for boards other than WWIV, and killing bugs. Trade Wars 2002 was Gary's new release, and if became the most popular version of Trade Wars. At this point (1989) there were 5 different releases of Trade Wars in development: Trade Wars 2 The original written in Microsoft Basic Yankee Trader Alan Davenport written in Microsoft Basic Trade Wars V, Galactic Armageddon Florida Sysop written in Pascal Trade Wars 2002 Gary Martin written in Pascal Galaxy Unknown Unknown At some point Alan Davenport stopped development on YT. I have tried to contact him to find out why, however have been unable to trace him. Trade Wars V also stopped development not long after this. The programmer just didn't have time to keep it up. Galaxy was in interesting variant, with a very nice ANSI interface. I only ever saw one version, and don't know what happened to it. Sherrick decided to move to the OS/2 market, and TW2 became OS/2 compatible. Development continued into the 90's, and then stopped (I would also like to contact both Sherrick and Morris if anyone has contact information for them). At one point Sherrick threatened legal action against Martech Software (Gary Martin), however Gary was able to prove that TW2002 did not share any source code with TW2, and Chris posted a note on Castle Ravenloft stating that he was stopping action (I do not have a copy of this, but I saw the post when it happened). Gary Martin made a deal with High Velocity Software to produce a Major BBS version of TW2002. While the MBBS version was bug ridden, it did allow multiple players online at once, which was a big advance. However the game was totally unstable. Whether it was the greatest advance in TW game play, or the greatest disaster is still being debated. In answer to the disaster of the MBBS version, Martech released V3 of TW2002 which allowed multi-player action on DOS based BBS's. The Trade Wars Game Server was released, and Gary sold the game to John Pritchett of EIS Online, who continues development today. The Mad Hatter

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