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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Developer and reverse engineer, Scott Percival, took a long look at a bug in the Oregon Trail game's river crossings.
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions selling 65 million copies. What you probably don't know is the game's great untold secret.
Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.
Whether the game depicts an adventure or an invasion depends on perspective. The original Oregon Trail video game from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) for the Apple II series took on a life of its own and grew and changed over several decades.
Previously:
(2024) Apple is Turning The Oregon Trail into a Movie
(2016) "You have died of dysentery" -- The Oregon Trail in Computer Class
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 24 2016, @10:09PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @10:39PM
A truly terrible way to die
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @12:35AM
You still have that same childlike innocent charm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @12:41AM
About as childlike and innocent as Stewie Griffin, you mean.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @11:25PM
When a "personal" "computer" cost $5000, you could expect to find one "computer" in every middle class home. Schools might have one "computer" per classroom or even dedicate a classroom to be a "computer" "laboratory" as they were called back then. "Computers" were a big deal. Kids were taught to believe that they could grow up to earn a lot of money if they learned how "computers" operated and how to "program" them. The expectation that there was money in "computers" was self-evident just from the cost of the "computers" themselves. "Computers" were the future and "programmers" would get rich.
Today all the "programmers" have been laid off and replaced by "coders" because as it turns out, prices were inflated in the old days, the real economic value of a "computer" which we now know is just a "phone" is only $50 [soylentnews.org] and the real economic value of a "coder" is $0 [soylentnews.org].
These days even the poorest folk carry at least 2 phones [youtu.be].
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @12:26AM
The troll is right on the money though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II [wikipedia.org]
Release date June 10, 1977; 39 years ago
Introductory price US$1,298 (equivalent to $5,069 in 2015)
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday July 25 2016, @12:36AM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @12:48AM
I have no idea what people are willing to pay for, nor do I care. I've heard Woz has the same attitude toward money, and yet Woz is rich as fuck.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday July 25 2016, @02:51AM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @03:54AM
No, I'm poor as fuck, because I never met my Steve "Blow" Jobs who wanted to exploit me for money. You think a naïve idealistic phreaker like Woz would have accomplished anything lucrative without Jobs?
(Score: 3, Informative) by jdavidb on Monday July 25 2016, @12:22PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday July 25 2016, @02:25AM
It helps if you know how to do something useful that you can then program the computer how to do more efficiently. CNC (machining) programmers are in pretty high demand, especially if you can do five axis. I had the perfect storm of a childhood for it, with my dad spending $3500 on an IBM PC in '81 when I was six, and also having a basic machine shop in the basement.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @02:44AM
I didn't have a machine anything in my basement growing up, because I grew up poor in a cochroach infested apartment. I didn't have a computer at home, and it didn't matter how many computer manuals I read as a child, I still couldn't break into the industry, because I had and still have absolutely no social connections.
What you're really saying is it helps to be rich, and it helps to go into the family business. It's no coincidence that Billy Gates is the son of a rich lawyer. It's no coincidence that rich musicians tend to be children of rich musicians.
You're just a lucky rich asshole, which is the key to success in America, land of opportunity for rich people, and social mobility for none.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday July 25 2016, @03:23AM
It may not have come across like it, but I was stating that I was lucky. Also, my parents were middle class, not rich, but yes, having resources does make a huge difference. What makes me an asshole though?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @05:42AM
Gawd, I wish I knew how to program CNC machines. I can still make anything a CNC guy can on a manual machine but managers fail to take into account the time required to program the damn things. I'd have a new job by 9 am tomorrow and I could get out from under a well meaning but minutia focused manager. The last program I wrote was a simple thing in Fortran IV on punch cards in 1977.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday July 25 2016, @07:11AM
There are plenty of free tutorials on the net if you want to learn. There are also free backplotting programs to test your code. If you can code Fortran I'm sure you could pick up Fanuc Macro B, which lets you do math, variables, and flow control in your gcode.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by Kenny Blankenship on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:13AM
Two phones, you say?
https://youtu.be/AXa3Ic5BiCg/ [youtu.be]
Someday, even Killer Meteors must fail.
(Score: 4, Funny) by GungnirSniper on Monday July 25 2016, @01:48AM
If kids today could just throw a pokeball at dysentery and AIDS they'd be fine.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @02:56AM
... does not actually appear in any version of the game. I guess it's like "Beam me up, Scotty."
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain_nifty on Monday July 25 2016, @04:00PM
In the late 80's we would all be ushered into the computer lab to have time with the only computers in the school, none of the teachers knew anything about them so we would just play the games for an hour (to be exposed to technology or something). I spent many enjoyable hours playing the Oregon Trail, but since we were only allowed an hour, and there was no way to save that I remember, and even if there was we got assigned random computers, so I never once completed the game. I remember one time I made it really far and was rafting my wagon down the Snake River, but most of the time I would just stop right out of town and start hunting. I always thought that the later mouse version where you just clicked to shoot was inferior to the early version I played where you would aim by rotating the hunter with the arrow keys, similar to asteroids, but stationary. Oregon Trail was my first shooter game, and it was awesome.