Apparently, this game was originally written outside of Digital,
probably at a university.  The game was ported to DEC's VAX/VMS
from the TOPS-10/20 FORTRAN sources available around fall 1979.
Ed James got hold of the sources at Berkeley and converted
portions of the code to C, mostly to use curses for the screen
handling.  He published his modified sources on the net in
December 1986.  Because this game ran on VMS machines for so
long, a previous version is known as VMS Empire.

WWW: http://www.catb.org/~esr/vms-empire/