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Oregon Trail — How 3 Minnesotans Forged Its Path
antdude writes "City Pages has a story and a visual history about the creation and development of Oregon Trail, one of the most popular educational games of all time. Quoting: 'With no monitor, the original version of Oregon Trail was played by answering prompts that printed out on a roll of paper. At 10 characters per second, the teletype spat out, "How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?" or, "Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?" Students typed in the numerical responses, then the program chugged through a few basic formulas and spat out the next prompt along with a status update. "Bad illness—medicine used," it might say. "Do you want to (1) hunt or (2) continue?" Hunting required the greatest stretch of the user's imagination. Instead of a point-and-shoot game, the teletype wrote back, "Type BANG."'"
If you had a 300 baud coupler, you were either in one of the rich school districts or close to the University of Minnesota. Most of the connections were 110 baud, or the "high speed" connections were a whopping 220 baud during that era (74-75). A few years later with some help from the good folks at AT&T (then Northwestern Bell Telephone Company that later became U.S. West and now Quest communications) the main trunk lines were upgraded and most of the connections were upgraded to 300 baud.... but that was about 1980 when that happened.
Most of the connections were routed to a dedicated phone line in an attempt to cut costs, where the connections were put through a multiplexer that was broken apart at the main computing facility at the University of Minnesota. This permitted most of the schools in a typical school district to use a local telephone number as it was in the local phone exchange too. Sometimes smaller school districts would share the same connections, and in my hometown the local community college and even a branch research lab of the University of Minnesota shared the connection.
When I was in high school, I discovered that the main telephone equipment for some reason was routed through the classroom where the computer science classes were held (Mr. Knudsen's 3rd floor classroom in Austin high school in Austin MN). I and a bunch of kids in the high school held what amounted to be a computer club, and often the teacher would lock the doors to the classroom and say "make sure you close the door when you leave" where we would sometimes stay for an hour or two after school... sometimes a bit longer than that.
We discovered a neat trick where if we unplugged the multiplexor, it would at least temporarily shut down the connections for everybody in the town. Keep in mind this was when phone lines were still somewhat unreliable, and typically when a connection dropped most people would re-dial the phone number to get back on and didn't think anything was really wrong with the equipment. In the meantime while everybody else in all of the other school districts (including I might add some college professors and college students trying to get major programming assignments finished) were busy redialing, my friends and I would quickly dial in and grab one of the temporary "empty" connections... essentially kicking other students off of the computer. Let's just say that the high school students never had to worry about a busy signal in the after-school club and sometimes even during class time. As for everybody else, their computer connections just seems a little less reliable than it really was... or rather they were depending on a bunch of high school students with selfish motives to keep the phone system going.
I had so much fun with that system where I can't possibly begin, and much of that began with playing Oregon Trail. Yes, I got bored with that game and moved on, but it ended up making me a computer professional with shall I say an unconventional educational experience. I'll also say that in particular with the Oregon Trail game, it motivated me to learn how to type in a big hurry.... which has helped me throughout life. I particularly learned how to type "POW" and "BANG" in a hurry.
Programmers worked to make educational software for Minnesotans as part of public agency. Some of their games were so good it contributed millions of dollars to the effort.
The government worried they were stifling the company and so sold it to a venture capitalist for $5,000,000
Three years later he sold it to a larger firm for hundreds of millions. The larger firm kept the intellectual property and fired all the expensive programmers ending Minnesotans educational experiment. The original programmers got zilch.
It all seems kind of tragic. Where are the public efforts to make technology help people now instead of just classes in how to use Microsoft office?