The Macintosh Classic is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1990 to September 1992. It was the first Macintosh to sell for less than US$1,000.
The Oregon Trail is a text-based strategy video game developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) beginning in 1975. It was developed as a computer game to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon via a covered wagon in 1847. Along the way the player must purchase supplies, hunt for food, and make choices on how to proceed along the trail while encountering random events such as storms and wagon breakdowns. The original versions of the game contain no graphics, as they were developed for computers that used teleprinters instead of computer monitors. A later Apple II port added a graphical shooting minigame.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, most commonly known as MECC, was an organization founded in 1973 best known for developing the edutainment video game series The Oregon Trail and its spinoffs. The goal of the organization was to coordinate and provide computer services to schools in the state of Minnesota; however, its software eventually became popular in schools around the world. MECC had its headquarters in the Brookdale Corporate Center in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. It was acquired by SoftKey in 1995 and was shut down in 1999.
Roomba is a term that refers to a series of autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners made by the company iRobot, and was first introduced in September 2002. Roombas have a set of sensors which help them navigate the floor area of a home. These sensors can detect the presence of obstacles and steep drops.
Number Munchers is an educational video game and a spin-off of Word Munchers. It was released by MECC for Apple II in 1986, then MS-DOS and Mac in 1990. The concept of the game was designed by R. Philip Bouchard, who also designed The Oregon Trail. Two versions of the game were released the Consumer Version and the School Version. After The Learning Company acquired MECC, the game was rebranded as "Math Munchers".
Word Munchers is a 1985 video game and the first of the Munchers educational series. It was made by MECC for Apple II, then ported to MS-DOS and Macintosh in 1991. It was re-released in 1996 for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh as Word Munchers Deluxe. The concept of the game was designed by R. Philip Bouchard, who also designed The Oregon Trail.
Scrabble variants are games created by changing the normal Scrabble rules or equipment.
Munchers is a series of educational video games produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) for several operating systems. The series was popular among American schoolchildren in the 1980s and 1990s and were the recipients of several awards. The two original games in the series were Number Munchers and Word Munchers. The brand name is currently owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but is defunct.
Lemonade Stand is a business simulation game created in 1973 by Bob Jamison of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). In it, the player moves through several rounds of running a lemonade stand, beginning each round by making choices dependent on their current amount of money about their stock, prices, and advertising. In each round, the results are randomized based on the player's inputs, as well as affected by random events such as thunderstorms and street closures. Each round ends with a summary of the player's current status, and the game ends after 12 rounds.
Oregon Trail II is an educational video game released by MECC in 1995. It was published by SoftKey Multimedia. It is a revised version of the original The Oregon Trail video game. It was redesigned with the help of American Studies PhD Wayne Studer. In contrast to the original version of the game, Oregon Trail II made an effort to include greater roles for women and racial minorities.
Spellbound! is an educational computer game made and distributed by The Learning Company aimed at teaching spelling, vocabulary, and language development to children ages 7 to 12 years. The objective of the game is to play spelling-related games to qualify and compete for successively higher bracket spelling bees, concluding with the player competing in the national spelling bee. The original game, released in 1991, was compatible with computers running DOS 3.3 or higher. A 1993 CD release added spoken dialogue and was compatible with Windows 95 and Mac.
Freedom! is a 1992 educational video game for the Apple II developed and published by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). Based on similar gameplay from MECC's earlier The Oregon Trail, the player assumes the role of a runaway slave in the antebellum period of American history who is trying to reach the North through the Underground Railroad. The game was developed with help of an African-American consultant who guided MECC on appropriate graphics and dialect that represented the era. It is recognized as one of the first video games dealing with the topic of slavery.
Beagle Bag is a collection of video games for the Apple II family of computers published in 1982 by Beagle Bros. It was released in unlocked and unprotected form and is now in the public domain.
A robotic vacuum cleaner, sometimes called a robovac or a roomba as a generic trademark, is an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner which has a limited vacuum floor cleaning system combined with sensors and robotic drives with programmable controllers and cleaning routines. Early designs included manual operation via remote control and a "self-drive" mode which allowed the machine to clean autonomously.
Scetlander was a software publisher which released titles for various 8- and 16-bit home computer systems in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jenny's Journeys is an educational video game published in 1984 by MECC for the Apple II. From a first-person view, players use a compass and a map to navigate a car containing the protagonist, Jenny, through a pixelated town. The player, acting as Jenny, provides directions at each intersection while the car's owner, 'Aunt Jenny', rides along. The objective of the game is to successfully travel from point to point while using the map. There are three levels of difficulty.
Amazon Trail II is a simulation video game developed by The Adventure Company and published by MECC for the Macintosh and Windows. It was released in September 1996. The game is a spin-off of The Oregon Trail.
Opening Night is a 1995 education/simulation video game by MECC, and developed in cooperation with The Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. It is aimed at children aged 10 and up.
The Oregon Trail is a series of educational computer games. The first game was originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach eighth grade schoolchildren about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.
The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy video game developed and published by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). It was first released in 1985 for the Apple II, with later ports to MS-DOS in 1990, Mac in 1991, and Microsoft Windows in 1993. It was created as a re-imagining of the popular text-based game of the same name, originally created in 1971 and published by MECC in 1975. In the game, the player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail in 1848. Along the trail, the player makes choices about supplies, resource management, and the route, and deals with hunting for food, crossing rivers, and random events such as storms and disease.
