Oregon trail has been documented historically in other places, but it first came out in 1971 and you accessed it using a teletype.  It went away for a few years and came back under MECC in 1974 and you still accessed by terminal.  I was in school all during the 70’s on the east coast, so I never ran into it.  MECC had it rewritten for the Apple II and released in 1985.

I got my first Apple computer at the end of 1984, an Apple //c.  Over the years, I kept an interest in the Apple II world and still have my original Apple //c.  It doesn’t work and have replaced it with a slightly newer version but, still hope to get it repaired.

I never heard of Oregon Trail until maybe twenty years later.  I’ve since then played the Apple II version using AppleWin and realized that it is exactly the kind of game I would have spent hours playing in school.  Of course, had I played it in school, it would have been using a teletype or other terminal, since the Apple II didn’t come out until several years after I finished school.

I was recently reading a history of the game and found a basic listing of one of the earlier versions was published in the May-June 1978 issue of Creative Computing.  I tracked a copy of this issue to Archive.org and printed out the article.  My plan is to enter this game into an emulated PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E and BASIC-PLUS giving it the feel to a certain extent of the original.  You would have to log on using a terminal in order to play the game.