One of the earliest commercially distributed computer games, The Oregon Trail was developed in 1971 and released first in 1974 for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The idea for the game came to programmer Don Rawitsch during his drive from New York City to Oregon in 1971. Rawitsch began writing the game when he returned to Carleton College, where he was a student at the time.
As the game became popular in Oregon schools, players requested a version that would run on smaller 8-bit microcomputers such as the Apple II. Rawitsch and a Carleton sophomore named Bill Heinemann reprogrammed it in C and ported it to the Apple II in 1978, and it was published in 1985 for other microcomputers. The game was also ported to most contemporary home and personal computers by companies like Brøderbund, which distributed the game.