In 1971, three college roommates developed an educational computer game. Titled OREGON, it was a simulation of westward migration along the Oregon Trail and proved to be a hit among the students. One of the designers, Don Rawitsch, later carried a copy of the source code to his new employer, Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). From 1975 to 1983, OREGON was MECC’s most popular courseware on their timeshare service. When MECC decided a new version was merited, which became The Oregon Trail, they mandated the design team to “preserve whatever made the original so popular.” With the availability of the source code for the 1975 and 1978 versions, we explore the design and implementation of OREGON and why it was popular and memorable.
In Fifth Edition (5e) Dungeons & Dragons™ (D&D), druids can transform into certain Beast forms using the Wild Shape ability. Similarly, casters of the Polymorph spell can transform allies and enemies into Beasts. Players often find selecting a Beast form onerous (there are 84 forms defined in the System Reference Document (SRD) alone) as this is a multi-dimensional decision problem.
On August 15th, 1971, President Nixon declared a 90-day freeze on wages, rents, and prices. The next day, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) was charged with implementing the Freeze. OEP launched an administrative crash program, leveraging the expansive power of the federal government, and also took the risky step of developing novel software to facilitate coordination of hundreds of federal employees. Originally called the Emergency Partyline, the software was soon known as EMISARI. EMISARI aided the OEP with internal communications, reporting, and conduct of their mission. Leveraging early time-sharing technology and a dialect of the BASIC language, EMISARI supported communications in the styles of chat, forums, and email as well as providing a flexible data collection and reporting workflow system. We explore the design and implementation of EMISARI and PARTY-LINE, the adjunct synchronous chat program, how EMISARI compared to the other software systems used by the OEP during the Emergency, and what lessons may be applied to modern startups and crash programs.
John Bridges is a software engineer that co-developed PCPaint, which in 1984 was one of the earliest digital painting programs and helped spur the use of mice within the IBM PC market. He supported the growing number of PC video developers by freely releasing the VGAKIT and TGA utilities, tools that helped developers understand and compensate for the many hardware and software quirks of the era. He was also on the forefront of presentation software, developing GRASP, GL Pro, and AfterGrasp, which supported the commercial development of interactive games, screen savers, and demos of graphical algorithms.
In this interview, we seek to understand the engineering craft during the pioneering days of the 1980s and 1990s, how Bridges approached design and implementation choices, and the impact of a programmer outside academia and the big technology firms.