Mike Schaeffer's Blog

June 12, 2007

I just saw this story on Oregon Trail over on Slashdot. I was born in 1975, which puts me in grade school in the early 1980's, the prime time for these early Apple ][ educational games. As much as I liked Oregon Trail, I liked Rocky's Boots even better. The basic premise of Rocky's Boots was that you had to use basic boolean logic circuits to build machines to solve particular tasks. You ran around a little maze using a very early 'point and click' style user interface to gather parts and put them together. Once you were done, you got to watch your creation do its thing. A fun little bit of trivia regarding Rocky's Boots is that it was developed by Warren Robinette, the creator of Atari 2600 Adventure, including the famous, ego-driven easter egg.