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fork(2) writes:

Smithsonian covers the legendary Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and it's killer game "The Oregon Trail."

Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. in its earliest days. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: "One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's." Apple II's loaded with MECC games.

Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English.

"MECC's goal was on putting a computer in the hands of every K-12 student in Minnesota," says Dale LaFrenz, MECC co-founder and CEO from 1985 to 1996. "We already had all schools in Minnesota running teletypewriters hooked to a huge UNIVAC [mainframe]." The UNIVAC was installed in a climate-controlled room at MECC headquarters. Up to 435 users across Minnesota could access it at one time from anywhere that had a telephone line.

Once MECC had this system, it needed a game.

[...] When MECC hired Rawitsch [Don Rawitsch, one of the authors/programmers of the game] in 1974, the game had been a dormant pile of papers for three years. MECC set him to work resurrecting the game, and as he did, he added new features. He read diaries of Oregon Trail pioneers for ideas on new events to include, such as pegging the likelihood of certain events to certain locations.

[...] "MECC went to Apple very early on and cut a deal for five Apple II's," says LaFrenz. "We launched The Oregon Trail for proof of concept, tested with Minnesota schools and had a positive evaluation." From there, MECC put out a solicitation for a hardware company to supply the computers. A dozen or so manufacturers answered, among them Radio Shack, IBM, Atari, Commodore and Apple. Apple was an industry lightweight, but Steve Jobs had parallel ideas about computer education.

"[The partnership] worked," LaFrenz says. "MECC became Apple's largest dealer and sold to all the Minnesota schools. MECC and Apple were always in sync, including a grand plan to 'save the world by putting computing power in the hands of every kid in America.' Humility did not run in the veins of Steve [Wozniak] and Steve [Jobs]."

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