Crazy thing: tweets can be linked to. https://twitter.com/Casey...2232741888

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Oh look, no need for a ridiculously large screenshot. Which you included twice.

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BartVanHemelen said:

Crazy thing: tweets can be linked to. https://twitter.com/Casey...2232741888

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Oh look, no need for a ridiculously large screenshot. Which you included twice.

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People enjoy and engage with images more here and on social media, and that's statistically proven.

Another crazy fact: I purposely cropped out the origin of the post.

The only glitch was the image posted twice, but that's the touchscreen ipad mixed with Flikr for you.

Is this in reference to the intro of "Family Name"?

nayroo2002 said:

Is this in reference to the intro of "Family Name"?

No this is a hilarious coincidence between the legendary OG computer game "The Oregon Trail" and Prince supposedly being in the same school at the same time, and even perhaps playing it as an educational tool...

ufoclub said:

nayroo2002 said:

Is this in reference to the intro of "Family Name"?

No this is a hilarious coincidence between the legendary OG computer game "The Oregon Trail" and Prince supposedly being in the same school at the same time, and even perhaps playing it as an educational tool...

So, that would be "YES", then.

onlyforaminute said:

ufoclub said:

onlyforaminute said:

ufoclub said:

What don’t you get? All the info is right there. Unless you don’t know what that classic game is.

No actually I don't nor is it important. I just see tying Prince to a game that happened to be at the same location at the same time with zero info if Prince himself had anything or was interested in the game. There's a word for relating things this way.

It's meant to show how two seemingly insignificant things at the same institution that year eventually became pop culture items. Nothing else. It's in humor. And the joke is to picture that maybe he actually had it as a learning tool if he was in the history class. The joke is perhaps proto Prince played the proto "The Oregon Trail"

Are you are trying to read into it more?

The game was developed in 1971 BUT not marketed by MECC until 1974, long after Prince was out of eighth grade.
So declaring something on Twitter to be a "factoid" (implying credibility) is a far reach.

Teh Google Machine is quite helpful in these cases.
https://artsandculture.go...m2Kw?hl=en

"These 1971 Carleton College yearbook photos of Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger (left to right) show the young student teachers who created The Oregon Trail."

[Edited 4/10/21 16:30pm]

Looking at the link provided by Laytonian, it's made clear that Rawitsch was a student teacher, thus still in college but doing the student teacher bit at the junior high. The game he developed himself was initially a board game, which he and his roommates developed into a teletype terminal game. That game was used at Bryant Junior High with 8th grade students in 1971, and then the game was deleted from the school mainframe at the end of the semester. Prince and the game were both in the building at the same time.

That the game was later re-created by Rawitsch a few years later, and then developed into the game many of us played is true. But its original creation was earlier, for 8th grade students at the school where Prince was an 8th grade student. Doesn't mean his history class actually used it, but it certainly is a real possibility. And since the game was (according to various sources you can find online) very popular at the time, with teachers from other classes arranging for their students to also get a chance at it, the chance is even bigger.

Now, even if Prince did play The Oregon Trail in 8th grade, it would not have been the same game... but he very well might have played its prototype. So I'm probably incorporating little Skipper taking his chances against dysentery as part of my head canon until someone proves it didn't happen.

[Edited 4/10/21 21:26pm]

ufoclub said:

There must be a way to bring this up as just the other claim to fame from this school without having to assume Prince was in that history class. It's not like there would have been a computer lab with a bunch of Apple II's in it.

lavendardrummachine said:

There must be a way to bring this up as just the other claim to fame from this school without having to assume Prince was in that history class. It's not like there would have been a computer lab with a bunch of Apple II's in it.

I know Apple donated thousands of computers to public schools in the early 80's, I was learning basic in 7th or 8th grade in 1982-3 in a room filled with apple computers. But I know nothing of ten years before that.

"But Doc Holiday said you had dysentery and I
I say it's senseless, oh baby,
Another lonely day on the Oregon Trail
Darling, baby, you, when will we get there?

ufoclub said:

onlyforaminute said:

ufoclub said: No actually I don't nor is it important. I just see tying Prince to a game that happened to be at the same location at the same time with zero info if Prince himself had anything or was interested in the game. There's a word for relating things this way.

It's meant to show how two seemingly insignificant things at the same institution that year eventually became pop culture items. Nothing else. It's in humor. And the joke is to picture that maybe he actually had it as a learning tool if he was in the history class. The joke is perhaps proto Prince played the proto "The Oregon Trail"

Are you are trying to read into it more?

Pretty sure he didn't. First of all, visual aids in the US schools in 1971 consisted of filmstrips and transparencies displayed by overhead projectors - not video games. Secondly, Oregon Trail wasn't put on the market until 1974.

Thirdly, the first video game most kids played was Pong - which was invented in 1972.

ufoclub said:

I know Apple donated thousands of computers to public schools in the early 80's, I was learning basic in 7th or 8th grade in 1982-3 in a room filled with apple computers. But I know nothing of ten years before that.

"But Doc Holiday said you had dysentery and I
I say it's senseless, oh baby,
Another lonely day on the Oregon Trail
Darling, baby, you, when will we get there?

Right, it was likely a weird cool pop culture thing from around his way he shared with friends but that doesn't mean he was actually playing or in that class.

Computer labs in those days involved a giant super computer and an actual lab, and personal computing wasn't really a thing, the hobbiest that did it all ended up owning patents. A computer and game would have likely been attached to a printer instead of a screen, but there really weren't printers so it could have been a board with lights. Which is to say, I don't know about this early version of the game, just that it's not like what most people would expect from experiences later in the 80's.

Genesia said:

ufoclub said:

It's meant to show how two seemingly insignificant things at the same institution that year eventually became pop culture items. Nothing else. It's in humor. And the joke is to picture that maybe he actually had it as a learning tool if he was in the history class. The joke is perhaps proto Prince played the proto "The Oregon Trail"

Are you are trying to read into it more?

Pretty sure he didn't. First of all, visual aids in the US schools in 1971 consisted of filmstrips and transparencies displayed by overhead projectors - not video games. Secondly, Oregon Trail wasn't put on the market until 1974.

Thirdly, the first video game most kids played was Pong - which was invented in 1972.

This was just a text game in its testing stage.

TheKid94 said:

Too*

Not in that sentence

ufoclub said:

Genesia said:

Pretty sure he didn't. First of all, visual aids in the US schools in 1971 consisted of filmstrips and transparencies displayed by overhead projectors - not video games. Secondly, Oregon Trail wasn't put on the market until 1974.

Thirdly, the first video game most kids played was Pong - which was invented in 1972.

This was just a text game in its testing stage.

Doesn't matter. There were no computers in middle school classrooms in 1971.

TheKid94 said:

Too*

Connected to, joined to, related to, linked to. Bart had it right.

Genesia said:

ufoclub said:

This was just a text game in its testing stage.

Doesn't matter. There were no computers in middle school classrooms in 1971.

Kids played the game, on a computer (an HP2100), in a junior high in Minneapolis in 1971. It was a teletype thing attached to the mainframe. No, they weren't experienced with computers--as one of the developers points out, it was almost certainly the first time any of them had anything to do with computers, and most probably didn't do anything else with them for a very long time. But 7th and 8th grade kids in Prince's school were playing the early version of Oregon Trail at the same time that Prince was an 8th grader, and (one can assume) having a history class. And maybe he was one of them.

It doesn't matter in the slightest if he was, and we're extremely unlikely to find out, but if you want to know more about the early game, here's a couple of articles.

https://medium.com/the-philipendium/how-i-managed-to-design-the-most-successful-educational-computer-game-of-all-time-4626ea09e184

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkx8vw/the-forgotten-history-of-the-oregon-trail-as-told-by-its-creators

https://web.archive.org/web/20110123012937/http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/1740595/

https://medium.com/the-philipendium/how-i-managed-to-design-the-most-successful-educational-computer-game-of-all-time-4626ea09e184

[Edited 4/13/21 15:17pm]