Oregon Trail, was Re: [rescue] Cool new gadget

[Dan Veeneman]

At 10:24 AM 3/11/03 -0500, Tim H. wrote:
>In fact, Oregon Trail celebrated its 20th anniversary a
>good 5 years ago.  The 20th anniversary edition came in a wooden box
>that talked about the first version which somehow ran on teletype
>machines before Macs, PCs, or even Apple II days.
>
>I have always wondered what they meant by "played on teletype machines"
>since they were dumb terminals.  I presume that they ran they game, and
>schools connected to it with TT.

Oregon Trail ran on Hewlett-Packard 2000 Time Shared BASIC
computers in the 1970s, which were commonly connected (either
directly or via modem) to teletype and printing terminals.

All of the input and output in Oregon Trail was text, of course.
If I recall correctly there was an attempt at ASCII art when
you died -- the program printed a tombstone with your name and
the date.  I do recall that the "deer hunt" was done by typing
"BANG" at the proper time.  Since HP's TSB had a timed input
function, the faster you typed "BANG" the better your success.
I have a listing of the program around here somewhere.

ObRescue: If anyone has any leads on memory and/or disk arrays
for Data General Aviion AV4300 machines, please contact me off-list.

ObRescue 2: If anyone has any old HP computers (or calculators) they
may wish to part with, I'd be interested in talking to you!


Cheers,

Dan
www.decodesystems.com/wanted.html