It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee for the Hewlett-Packard 2000 minicomputer in HP Time-Shared BASIC.

Trek73 simulates multi-ship starship combat in a smaller play area and does not include the more strategic elements of the original, like starbases and the galactic map layout.

Dave Korns adapted the code to support smart terminals, using the cursor control characters on the Hazeltine 2000 to produce an in-place updating display.

In the mid-1980s, Dave Pare and Chris Williams translated the original BASIC version into C and Jeff Okamoto, Peter Yee, and others corrected and enhanced the source code.

In January 1973, William K. Char[2] began programming a space battle game in BASIC on a time-shared Hewlett-Packard 2000C system at Wilson High School in San Francisco.

Then student Oscar Luppi and other members of the computer department added ranging, aiming and several cheat codes that became standard in newer versions.

Later, Dave Pare and Chris Williams at the University of California, Berkeley independently translated TREK73 into the C programming language in 1984.