Install trader with Homebrew, apt, dnf, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• trader

Project history

The official project page says the original game was Steven Faber's Star Lanes, published in Interface Age in June 1977. S. J. Singer republished it as Star Traders in 1984, and John Zaitseff modified that version for MBASIC on CP/M-80, releasing it on March 7, 1988.

Zaitseff then rewrote Star Traders in 1990 for the Australian MicroBee running CP/M-80 on a Z80, using Turbo Pascal. Further ports followed: CP/M-86 in 1992, MS-DOS in 1993, VGA/EGA/CGA DOS in 1994, and a Windows 3.1 graphical rewrite in 1995.

After almost sixteen years without a major release, the game was rewritten again in C for Unix-like operating systems. Version 7.0 was released on July 25, 2011, making the game available to modern Unix, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Cygwin users.

Adoption history

The official page documents a modern Unix source release, an AppImage, precompiled packages for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, macOS, and Cygwin, plus an APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu. The input facts also show package-manager coverage in Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

The current page lists Star Traders 7.21 and copyright years 1990-2026, showing that the project remains maintained as a nostalgia-friendly terminal game rather than a one-off historical archive.

How it is used

Star Traders is used as an interactive terminal game: players create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay money, and try to become the wealthiest player. For package users, the executable is simply trader.

Why package nerds care

The package is significant mostly as preservation-friendly software: a retro BASIC and Pascal game lineage kept buildable as a modern C command-line program. It is the kind of small, self-contained Unix game that package managers keep alive beyond its original platforms.

Timeline

• 1977: Star Lanes is published in Interface Age.
• 1984: S. J. Singer republishes the game as Star Traders.
• 1988: John Zaitseff releases an MBASIC CP/M-80 version.
• 1991: Version 4.1 is released for the MicroBee CP/M-80 rewrite.
• 1993: Version 4.4 is released for CP/M-86.
• 1994: Version 5.4 is released for IBM-compatible DOS systems.
• 1995: Version 6.0 is released for Windows 3.1.
• 2011: Version 7.0 is released as a C rewrite for Unix-like operating systems.
• 2026: The official page lists Star Traders 7.21.

Related projects

• The project preserves historical versions for MBASIC, CP/M-80, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Commodore 64.
• The modern Unix distribution participates in the GNU Translation Project under the trader domain.

Sources

• https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader - official page with game description, download/package information, Git URL, and detailed history section.