It all started in 1969. Here's a pictures taken of two Star Trek fans of the 60's. Look familiar? They should! These are the parents of Andrew Maxwell, creators of what would eventually become Ten Forward!

This picture was taken just before one of them had to leave for Germany, which inspired them find a means to continue to communicate with each other about their favourite subject, Star Trek!

The computers were not what they are now back then, there was no Internet Explorer, no Netscape, no Intel® Pentium® 4 Processors with DVD-writers. Hell, they didn't even have more than two colors. Despite this minor obstacle, these dedicated Trekkies managed to create a program that allowed their communication anyway.

They named the program:
"The Enterprise Rec-Deck 10, an electronic message system"

Obviously the original Enterprise didn't have much of a Ten Forward equivalent, so this was what had to do instead.

Here's what one of their computers looked like. Well, the screen and keyboard anyway, the rest of the machine would take up about the rest of their house. But this was quite alright, considering they spent most their time behind their computers anyway!

The program itself allowed them to send a "post" that could be read by both of them. Each of these posts would show their handle, their rank, and indeed their character image. They could actually choose between either one imagine, Kirk OR Spock!

ASCII art was required to make all three images, which included the Enterprise header shown when the program was run. Here follows an screenshot of the login screen: