The Oregon Trail, an educational computer game popular in American elementary schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s which took players on a journey from Independence, Missouri, to an embarrassing death from dysentery in the middle of nowhere, was actually first developed in 1971 by three student-teachers. It was developed further in 1974 when one of those students, Don Rawitsch, took a job at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, but it did not find wide release until 1985, by which time floppy disks had come into popular use.