CategoryComputer Age

Pong/Oregon Trail

I can see why The Oregon Trail game was one of the most played games, it brought interest not into the game, but also into the history of what could have happened for so many people. As I started to play the game, I found myself no knowing what to choose, I didn’t know which would be the smarter decision or how I would defeat the game in a sense. When a tragic event occurred it made me want...

Early Video Games: The Oregon Trail and Pong

The Oregon Trail The Oregon Trail is an educational computer game originally developed in 1971 by three student teachers, with the intention of teaching school children about the pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. Despite bugs, the game immediately gained popularity among students, with thousands of players monthly; it was so popular that it was eventually re-released as a standalone game...

The Evolution of GUIs

This is a heuristic evaluation of my perspective that compares early GUIs to modern GUIs. Image source: Image source: A screenshot of my desktop (Apple MacBook Pro) What changed? Color: the immediate change that I see is color. Early GUIs only had black and white, while today we have all sorts of colors. Resolution & speed: today we have interfaces of high resolution leading to a higher speed...

The Rise of Early Video Games

Image source: Image source: The Oregon Trail The Oregon Trail is an educational game that launched in 1971, it attempts to simulate what it was like to travel the Oregon Trail in 1848. Why I think it became one of the most popular games of its time: Personalization I was asked to choose what the scope of my journey was, when to start my journey, what kind of person I would be (farmer, banker, or...

Oregon Trail and Pong

The Oregon Trail was successful because it was engaging and well-designed. Players can choose which role they want to play and complete a series of tasks. It has uncomplicated but highly interactive pages. And I think this game gives the player a high degree of freedom. Because I think the products designed by designers should not only guide users to complete a specific task, but also give users...

early video Games

I played the Oregon tail (1990), and for this game, I can see this being a very popular game at the time. Oregon tail feels like telling a story, but under the player’s controls for the autorun setup, and the sweet thing right here is the user can feel like they are involved in the story and see some visual movement on the screen, that’s ten times more interesting than looking at a storybook that...

comparing Interfaces in the xerox star (1982) to present

Looking at the very first interfaces of a computer from Xerox star, we can see a lot of simulation and the same pattern of the layout. First, the layout of the desktop is almost the same as what we have now, with folders stacked one after another as the default arrangement. The icon for the folder and the text file is very similar to what we’ve been using till nowadays, the only difference for...

People Bonding over Playing Pong

Pong was one of the first social games, a fact that the game’s creator, Bushnell, appreciated. He said, “it was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand, pulled a guy off a barstool and said, ‘I’d like to play pong, and there’s nobody to play.'” It was a way you could play games you were sitting shoulder to shoulder. You could talk, you could laugh...

About the GUI of a 1984 Macintosh

The graphical user interface in a 1984 Macintosh was pretty impressive, considering Microsoft Windows wasn’t even out yet, and computers were basically command-line interfaces at this time. So having a graphical desktop environment was pretty remarkable.  The graphical interface in a 1984 Macintosh is black and white, and runs at 512 x 384 resolution — it was designed for a Mac with an...

early games

The Oregon Trail and Pong! are two different types of video games, while both succeeded when they were released. After playing the two versions of the Oregon Trail, I can see why it is so popular. First, there are so many choices and freedom in it. There are thousands of combinations and possibilities in the game. From what I learned from game design classes, uncertainties are always appealing...

Changes of GUI

The computer interface has changed a lot since the first release of the Star system. There is also a massive leap from Star to the first macintosh. What I noticed the most was the evolution of the keyboard. As people can see, there is a separate part for the Star keyboard to accomplish tasks like move, copy& paste, etc. However, users use digital buttons in the macintosh system to complete...