A sourced timeline
The history of educational technology at Minnesota
Minnesota has an outsized place in the history of educational computing: the state that gave
the world The Oregon Trail is also home to the university whose campus mascot lent its
name to the Gopher protocol — for a moment in the early 1990s, the front door to the internet.
This timeline traces how teaching technology arrived, changed, and was contested at the
University of Minnesota. Every event cites its sources.
Hear it firsthand: the Charles Babbage Institute — the world's leading
computing-history archive, housed at UMN — holds oral histories with the people in this
timeline, with transcripts free online:
Marvin
Stein ↗ (hired in 1955 to teach UMN's first computer courses),
Dale
LaFrenz ↗ (MECC co-founder, from Dartmouth BASIC to The Oregon Trail),
Peter
Patton ↗ (UMN academic computing director, on PLATO courses in the humanities),
William
Norris ↗ (ERA and Control Data), and
Mark
McCahill ↗ (the Gopher protocol, from inside UMN computing services). Browse the full
collection at
CBI
Oral Histories ↗, and see digitized photographs and documents — from the
1958
dedication of UMN's first computer ↗ to an original
"Internet
Gopher" services pamphlet ↗ — in
UMedia ↗, the
Libraries' digital collections.