History
In 1971 Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught a history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on an HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help.
The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on 3 December 1971. Despite bugs, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to others on Minneapolis Public Schools' time-sharing service. When the next semester ended, however, Rawitsch deleted the program, although he printed out a copy of the source code.
Read more about this topic: The Oregon Trail (video game)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)