Oregon Trail

The original Oregon Trail. Painstakingly copied by hand from the May 1978 issue of Creative Computing.

Usage

Versions

We offer three versions of the program:

• working copy
• historical original
• modern refactor

The original DEC BASIC-PLUS syntax was specific to the PDP-11 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. The only breaking change is the symbol used for the exponentiation operator.

The working copy is produced by:

sed 's/\*\*/^/g' original/oregon.bas

Building

Windows/Linux:

FreeBASIC - https://github.com/freebasic/fbc

fbc oregon.bas

MacOS:

QB64 - https://github.com/QB64Team/qb64

qb64 -c oregon.bas

Background On The OREGON Program

In 1971, Don Rawitsch and Bill Heinemann were participating together in a practice teaching program as students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Don was teaching a class on the history of the American West and provided the preliminary information which Bill, a math teacher, used to construct the OREGON program. The program was first implemented on the Minneapolis Schools timesharing system. On the completion of the practice teaching program, the program was removed from the Minneapolis system and remained only as a curled up listing until Don joined the MECC staff in 1974 and loaded it onto the MECC system. Don then proceeded to do further research on the Oregon Trail and modified the program for historical accuracy to produce the present version. The program has been implemented on Hewlett-Packard UNIVAC, and Control Data systems.

References

• Don Rawitsch Reddit AMA
• Don Rawitsch presentation
• Oregon Trail’s Co-Creator Didn’t Make Much Money. He Should Have Chosen to Be a Banker.
• The Forgotten History of 'The Oregon Trail,' As Told By Its Creators
• The History Behind The Oregon Trail