With Storybook Weaver, users can compose a story, typing text and clicking and dragging objects and characters onto different backgrounds for illustrations.Īll MECC games had to do four things, says Rawitsch. “We found a common vision about computing and kids and education,” says LaFrenz. Minnesota was set, but MECC and Apple wanted the country. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through school before they even got their first computer, so we thought the kids can't wait.” “We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy computers for the schools, and it was real slow. “There were about only 10 percent of schools that even had one computer in them in 1979,” said Jobs, in the 1995 interview. MECC and Apple were always in sync, including a grand plan to 'save the world by putting computing power in the hands of every kid in America.' Humility did not run in the veins of Steve and Steve. “MECC became Apple’s largest dealer and sold to all the Minnesota schools. Apple was an industry lightweight, but Steve Jobs had parallel ideas about computer education.
A dozen or so manufacturers answered, among them Radio Shack, IBM, Atari, Commodore and Apple. “We launched The Oregon Trail for proof of concept, tested with Minnesota schools and had a positive evaluation.” From there, MECC put out a solicitation for a hardware company to supply the computers. “MECC went to Apple very early on and cut a deal for five Apple II's,” says LaFrenz. The company had a hunch the personal computer was going to move the education system away from the mainframe. In 1978, MECC's product development team retooled The Oregon Trail for the color-screen Apple II released a year earlier.
“When the first personal computers hit the market-Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore Pet-MECC realized that it wouldn’t take long for schools to adopt them,” says Rawitsch.
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We printed on paper the entire listing of the programming code for the game.” The Oregon Trail was only a month old.īefore Apple computers, Minnesota schools were equipped with teletypewriters, like this one. “We had to remove the game from the Minneapolis Schools computer,” says Rawitsch, “and we had no other computer to run it on. As soon as Rawitsch uploaded it to the UNIVAC mainframe it became a hit. Along the way the player manages his or her wagon train through river crossings, food shortages, injuries, illnesses, breakdowns and theft. The game starts in Missouri, 1848, where the player equips a party of pioneers for the 2,000-mile journey to Willamette Valley, Oregon. When they removed the game from the mainframe for Minnesota's schools, they printed the programming code for the game.ĭon Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, three student teachers enrolled at nearby Carleton College, created The Oregon Trail in November 1971 for an eighth-grade history class Rawitsch was teaching. Once MECC had this system, it needed a game.ĭon Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger created The Oregon Trail in November 1971. Up to 435 users across Minnesota could access it at one time from anywhere that had a telephone line. ” The UNIVAC was installed in a climate-controlled room at MECC headquarters. “We already had all schools in Minnesota running teletypewriters hooked to a huge UNIVAC. “MECC’s goal was on putting a computer in the hands of every K-12 student in Minnesota,” says Dale LaFrenz, MECC co-founder and CEO from 1985 to 1996.
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From 1978 to 1999, MECC, together with Apple, competed against private software companies to turn American children into a nation of computer-savvy early adopters and make computer class as much a part of American schooling as math and English. The State of Minnesota threw huge funds to entice computer programmers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul when it created MECC in 1973. Minnesota was a Midwestern Silicon Valley by the early 1970s. Steve Jobs said as much in a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution: “One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's.” Apple II's loaded with MECC games. Never heard of MECC? It went hand in hand with Apple Computer Inc. All games you played in school, all made by the same state-funded company-the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Quandary, Lemonade Stand, DinoPark Tycoon, Storybook Weaver. The Oregon Trail, The Yukon Trail, Number Munchers, Word Munchers, The Secret Island of Dr.
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