Apple II Educational Software on the Internet Archive

Apple II educational software is what a generation of students met in the school computer lab: The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Word Munchers and dozens of quieter drills on spelling, geography and math. Much of it came from one place, a Minnesota state agency called MECC, and much of it can be played again in a browser on the Internet Archive.

## How MECC put software in schools

In late 1971 three student teachers from Carleton College, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, built The Oregon Trail for an eighth-grade history class Rawitsch was teaching. It ran on a teletype terminal. Minnesota created the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1973 to bring computing to its schools, and Rawitsch brought the game with him when he joined.

In 1978 MECC chose the Apple II for Minnesota schools, bought the machines in bulk and resold them to districts, becoming one of Apple's biggest dealers. It retooled The Oregon Trail for the Apple II's color screen and shipped disks of classroom programs alongside the hardware; the original game rode along for years on a disk called Elementary Volume 6. In 1981 MECC began selling its catalog to schools outside the state, packaged with teaching guides for teachers who had never used a computer.

The best-known titles came in the mid-1980s. Designer R. Philip Bouchard led the 1985 redesign of The Oregon Trail, the version with hunting, river crossings and the infamous dysentery, and also designed Number Munchers (1986), where you steer a green creature around a grid eating correct answers.

## What you'll find in the Apple II educational software archive

The archive's Apple II library holds many MECC releases in several versions, along with titles from other educational publishers. Two collections are worth knowing. The 4am Collection preserves disks by a preservationist known as 4am, who removed the original copy protection so they boot cleanly, and many items come with an extras archive alongside the disk image. The Hagstrom Collection goes further, with flux-level readings of original floppies and photos of the packaging, including an Oregon Trail 1.4 box that actually reads "The New Oregon Trail" on the front.

Most items open straight into an Apple II emulator in the page. Keep in mind that these programs expect a keyboard, and many were written for a teacher to set up, so a menu of class options is often the first thing you see. On Arkibber, searching "MECC" and filtering to software is the fastest way through the catalog, and the software & games hub covers other platforms.

## Why it matters

Apple's success in schools was built partly on MECC; Steve Jobs said in a 1995 interview that schools buying Apple IIs helped build the company. These programs are also an early record of educational game design, with real debates about how much play belongs in a lesson. For many people, they were the first software they ever used.

For what home users were running in the same years, early Macintosh software is a good next stop.