He Created the Oregon Trail | Hacker News Reader

He Created the Oregon Trail

slate.com

82 pointsbenbreen32 comments

This article set me up to tell me how the Oregon Trail went from being the brainchild of three educators not interested in money to the hugely explosive software it became… but left me unfulfilled. What happened after he published the source code? Who decided to sell it for money??

Don Rawitsch was hired by a state funded educational software group to develop a version of it for them. That, and it’s descendants, are the ones that became commercial.

The answer to that is in this article[1]. I remember it from a HN thread[2] earlier this year.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-you-wound-play...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871196

How many Canadians remember Cross Country Canada? It was a similar educational text-adventure where you learned about Canadian geography and commodities as you navigated your truck through greasy spoon dining shops and sketchy motels. We lived on it in the computer lab.

That game was full of really neat Easter eggs that were a lot of fun to find as a kid.

If you “buckle up”d before driving and got into a crash it would cost less money to fix.

You could exit your truck, lock the door, and throw away the keys to strand yourself.

You could order room service from the motel.

Looks like you can play it online through Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Crosscountry_Canada_1991

There's also a USA version (the original) - I remember fiddling with the radio and oversleeping in said sketchy motels

Sounds like the first Leisure Suit Larry to me.

In these times of supply chain woes, what better game to assign the kids? It’s not like they’re old enough to play the beer game.

Source to Oregon Trail published in Creative Computing Magazine (May, 1978) here (page 134):

https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingbetterScan19780...

How might one go about running this original code on a modern day PC? An emulator of sorts?

It's BASIC.

BASIC has lots of different dialects. Anybody know which one this is, and what modern choices would be compatible with it?

I don't see too many quirks in the listing, so most any classical BASIC variant should handle it. Like PC-BASIC[1], FreeBASIC[2], or the venerable GW-BASIC[3]. (The later I think you need to run in DOSBox though.)

I did notice one unique keyword that should be easy to fix.

    6200 PRINT "TYPE "; S$(56)
    6210 B3 = CLK(0)
    6220 INPUT C$
    6230 B1 = CLK(0)
    6240 B1=((B1-B3)*3600)=(D9-1)

I couldn't find 'CLK' in any of the BASICs I know of. Seems from context to be a time function. My guess is it returns number of seconds since system boot, or program start.

[1] http://www.pc-basic.org/

[2] https://www.freebasic.net/

[3] http://gw-basic.com/

Was about to Google it.. and.. you've done the work for me. Thank you!

I'm confused by the code listing in the magazine. The Os are 0s and the 0s are Os for no good reason.

Here is the code typed up: https://github.com/LiquidFox1776/oregon-trail-1978-basic

In the early days, the important thing was to be able to distinguish between zero and oh. There was no standard yet established for the best way to do that. At least it was better than typewriters, which didn't have zero or one keys at all - you had to use the upper-case O and lower-case L instead.

Programmers had been putting slashes through zeros long before The Oregon Trail showed up, and my Mom might even have an old, hand-written IBM coding form lying around to prove it. I imagine in this case it is probably OCR gone awry that confused the zeros and Os.

As one who originally took typing class on manual typewriters, I can tell you that every typewriter I’ve ever used had zeros and ones. If one were to tell me that there existed portable typewriters that did not have those characters, I might believe it.

I never said slashed zeros were unknown, just that conventions hadn't settled yet and were far from universal. Sometime you got a dot in the middle instead of a slash.

I don't know if OCR even existed back when this was published. If it did, it wasn't common.

The manual typewriter I learned to type on did not have a zero or one.

I get that, but this is the opposite of what is normal. This is replacing Os with 0s which I've never seen outside of warez sites in my 40 years with computers.

If you go back far enough, there was no "normal". 40 years might not be far enough back. Different equipment did things differently. Which was O and which was 0 was a matter of convention, there weren't any rules for it and still aren't.

Store-bought software was a co-revolution with home personal computers. Before then it was commercial oriented mainframe software. The mainframe computer manufacturers wrote some software; corporate users wrote some software; consulting software companies some for a rather small market.

Software stores didnt really get started until 1976 or so. Oregon Trail was 5 years before that. MicroSoft was an early vendor with BASIC for the Altair, then other PCs in 1975. I attended the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 where there were a few software vendors including MicroSoft. Floppy disks were just getting started. Alternatives were punch tape, cassette tapes, and telephone modem downloads.

The next big software revolution was downloadable self-installing internet apps, pioneered by Apple. In most cases this is just just 2 to 4 clicks of a mouse. No messy purchase of box in the store, copying multiple disks into the computer, and praying your license key was valid.

It always amazes me how making money can be the furthest thing on people’s minds when they work on some cool innovative new project, to the point where they actively seem to go out of there way to not make any kind of money.

I envy it, because it relieves so much stress and other things that kill creativity. Unfortunately I can't just go without income, so the idea of a purely passion project isn't really in the cards for me unless it's a very small effort.

The lesson for me from modern mobile games and microtransaction models is that addictive gameplay is actually distinct from engaging gameplay and very few modern developers are focusing on the latter. It seems to be very nearly the exclusive domain of indies nowadays.

I can't think of a single mobile game that has any artistic value to me, but there are quite a few for the PC and consoles. A front-end for farming money and high quality entertainment should be considered different kinds of computer programs, and not lumped together as "games".

> I can't think of a single mobile game that has any artistic value to me

Monument Valley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_Valley_(video_game)

I guess I don't ascribe particularly high value to the category of games, I think even very simple games designed to take money from the player count. But I do agree on the mobile vs PC divide broadly in terms of what's on the market. I would actually cite Civ as a series that's still trying hard to do engaging things, in the form of constant but varied puzzles with intellectual complexity which reward planning and forethought.

I think the framing of the article is odd. I'm assuming he was paid a salary as an employee of MECC. That was his pay. He got paid.

If the article is supposing he should have some intellectual property rights since he and two colleagues invented the whole thing... I agree! However, employment contracts still stipulate things like any and all intellectual property created by the employee on company equipment is automatically owned by the company. Some contracts are even more restrictive and give companies ownership over everything their employees create while they're under contract.

God forbid your employees have hobbies they might want to monetize. It's a great way to stifle creativity and progress IMHO.

Although, as a professional software developer, I've found that it makes me value my ability to write software more than the software artifacts I create. Kind of like an artist. Only one person can own your painting or sculpture. Your ability to create art is what puts food on the table.

>...However, employment contracts still stipulate things like any and all intellectual property created by the employee on company equipment is automatically owned by the company. Some contracts are even more restrictive and give companies ownership over everything their employees create while they're under contract.

Oregon Trail was created before he took the job at MECC. He essentially donated the code to the company.

In 1971, the idea of selling software was completely foreign. If it was important software like a compiler or OS, it came with the computer you just spent millions on. If it was important software that you needed to run your business, you paid your team of programmers to develop it. If it was something inconsequential like a game, you gave it away.

In Australia we had a similar game called Goldfields. Every kid loved it and playing it is one of my most fond memories of primary school. A fantastic way to teach history and economics at the same time.

https://www.squakenet.com/game/goldfields/

I wouldn’t be surprised if kids still play it today.

A modern game that sparked a similar joy to Oregon Trail: https://scriptwelder.itch.io/waterworks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

> also known as the Oregon Trail Generation

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