Even if you are not a fan of the television show Star Trek, chances are at some point you have run across clips from it, perhaps with one of the crewmen sitting half-buried in a pile of fluffy softball-sized critters. Perhaps you know they were called “tribbles” – and that they reproduced at rates of ten to every one every twelve hours (which by the calculations of ever-logical Spock would come out to be 1.7 million in exactly three days), and clogging up all the ship’s systems. Or even if you don’t know all the details, perhaps you just enjoyed the humor and cuddliness of one of the original series’ most famous episodes.

On this day, December 29, in 1967, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” probably the best known episode Star Trek (the original series) premiered.

The script was first written by David Gerrold, then an unknown freelance writer – Star Trek was actually his first major sale. Although he became a well-respected science fiction writer in his own right, publishing 50 books with multiple ones winning science-fiction literature’s highest awards, and had one story adopted into a major motion picture, to legions of Star Trek fans he would be best known as man who wrote the Tribbles episode.