Skedaddle wrote on 2025-01-22, 06:17:

Hello,

So I was going down memory land and trying to remember what the first computer I had ever used was. For the longest time I was convinced that it was the Apple II, but the time frame doesn't line up. I was born in '87, so I would've been in school starting about '92, and I very distinctly remember using the 5.25" floppy to play Oregon Trail but now can't figure out what model computer that may have been. Any help figuring this out would be amazing!

Was this from a small town or a more affluent area? I just ask because poorer schools tended to keep computers significantly longer. We had some hand-me-down Apple IIe and Apple IIc systems in a classroom even into 1993-1995 if I remember correctly. That's about when I was playing Oregon Trail.

Also, in a general sense, 5.25" floppies were pretty outdated by the early 90s, at least in the USA. The drives were certainly still found in a lot of computers of different types, but I feel like it would have been more common for schools in the 90s to be using 5.25" floppies on an older Apple II(e,c) vs on a PC, mostly because PCs were so much more expensive and complicated at the time. An Apple II left over from the 80s would have cost a fraction of what an IBM or equivalent would have cost.

I would suggest finding videos or screenshots of some different platforms playing Oregon Trail to see if the music or graphics from one is more familiar.

This is a good start:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/746/the-oregon … il/screenshots/

The hunting scene is probably a dead giveaway, since most of us probably spent an inordinate amount of time "hunting" (target shooting and wasting meat). In DOS it is either using an eye-searing cyan\magenta\white\black color-scheme in CGA mode, or the colors are a lot nicer (with proper use of brown, white and gray) in EGA\VGA. Apple II has green trees but solid white animals. Both are quite distinctive.