Nostalgia for DOS

Finally, someone made Oregon Trail easily available online. Thank God. It really takes me back.

My cousin, Carla, introduced me to Oregon Trail during a family reunion-ish thing at her house in North Carolina when I was six or seven. Her family was apparently more tech-savvy than mine in the early '90s (or her parents just weren't as skeptical of any kind of game played on a brightly lit screen) and someone had installed the game on their computer.

One afternoon, she and my cousin, Mary, and I spent an hour or two on a few attempted ventures West with wagon loads of characters we named after our actual family members, most of whom were probably in the other room. I don't remember if we ever "won," but I do clearly recall thinking it was hilarious when our virtual relatives would get sick or drown.

Except for my first experience with the Internet a year or two later, when I spent close to three hours in a high school computer lab totally mystified by NBA.com, my introduction to Oregon Trail is the most fascinated I've ever been by technology. My brain had not yet developed a file in which to categorize experiences with interactive "virtual reality," and so the primitively-animated trips to Oregon's Willamette Valley felt sort of real. It didn't feel authentic to some crazy, scary extent, but just enough to make me excited and slightly confused.

It's a little pathetic, I guess, but those imagined treks to the Old West are a lot more vivid in my memory than my family's actual trip to the East coast that year. Oh well.