A strange little side quest
My Little Phone may feel immediate, but the ideas around learning games have been evolving for a very long time. The Oregon Trail eventually appeared across generations of computer hardware and sold tens of millions of copies, making it one of the most enduring educational games. The broader history adds one more wrinkle. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. It is a good reminder that simple game mechanics can carry a surprising amount of history.
