**************************************************************************
*                                                                        *
*              Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading              *
*                 Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff                 *
*                                                                        *
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Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective
is to  create companies, buy and  sell shares, borrow and  repay money, in
order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).

The following history is presented in reverse chronological order.  If you
would like to  see a list of detailed changes to  this project, you should
consult the Subversion repository for "trader" on The ZAP Group web server
at http://www.zap.org.au/services/svn/.


Version 7.0 (not yet released)
------------------------------

Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
such as Linux.  It requires a text console of at least 80x24 in size.  The
code is written in the C programming language as a learning exercise for a
number of  software tools  and libraries; the  algorithms in  the original
Pascal and Visual Basic versions are reused for the game logic.


Early history
-------------

The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game  was written  by S. J.
Singer in 1984 using Altair  Basic.  This was modified for Microsoft Basic
(MBASIC) running under  the CP/M-80 operating system by  John Zaitseff and
released on 7th March, 1988.

Star Traders  was then  completely rewritten in  1990 for  the Australian-
designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 processor,
using Turbo Pascal 3.01a.  Essentially, only the name of the game and some
of the ideas  were retained in this version.  Version 4.1  of Star Traders
was released on 1st August, 1991.

In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with 8"
drives!)  running  CP/M-86 on an  8086 processor, using Turbo  Pascal 2.0.
This version had colour added to  it in the form of ANSI escape sequences;
version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.

The next version  came in 1993, when the program was  recompiled to run on
IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS.  Turbo Pascal 6.0 was
used for  this.  The ANSI  escape sequences were slightly  different under
MS-DOS than  under the NEC,  in that the  NEC supported a number  of extra
character attributes.

Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines with
VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters.   The output routines were recoded to
use  a "windowed" look.   Borland Pascal  7.0 was  used for  this purpose,
along with a number of  text window manipulation modules.  Version 5.4 was
released on 1st June, 1994.

In 1995,  Star Traders was  completely rewritten for the  16-bit Microsoft
Windows 3.1  graphical environment.  Microsoft  Visual Basic 3.0  was used
for this purpose.  Although  completely rewritten, the original algorithms
were reused from previous versions.   Version 6.0 of the game was released
on 15th September, 1995.

Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later...