Bill Gates' masterpiece, DONKEY.BAS, finally available for iPhone

http://technologizer.com/2012/01/28/donkey-bas-is-back/

by technologizer • 14 years ago

54 20 14 years ago

My knowledge of DONKEY.BAS comes from Andy Hertzfeld's story[1] on Folklore.org, which paints the game in a somewhat less nostalgic light.

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

contextfree• 14 years ago

My favorite comment about that was one by "Reed" in this Jeff Atwood blog post -> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/bill-gates-and-donk...:

"DONKEY.BAS is actually a great illustration of the early philosophy of MS/PC vs. the Mac philosophy (which has endured to this day, unlike the MS/PC philosophy): The PC and BASIC are for churning out crappy hacks at 4AM that get something simple done acceptably well, not spending days/weeks/months wandering through the Mac toolkit documentation, compiling Pascal, tring to figure the frameworks out, creating icons and graphics, and trying to make some really elegant program.

Compare that idea to Donkey.net to see how much the programming philosophy of MS has changed:

'Donkey .NET is a three-dimensional driving simulator game that demonstrates the new features available to Microsoft Visual Basic developers. Written in Visual Basic .NET RTM, this sample uses XML Web services, multithreading, structured exception handling, shaped Windows Forms, and custom-drawn controls. The sample includes the setups for both the game application and an optional XML Web service used with the game. The setups will also install the source code.'

jeebus. I know it's supposed to basically be a parody, but that means that there's somtehing there to parody!"

bwarp• 14 years ago

I think both donkey.bas and donkey.net try and demonstrate the platform's abilities rather than promote elegance.

Things have just got a lot more complicated since donkey.bas.

I don't like the Mac platform as a whole - it doesn't and has never delivered the software environment required for industrial grade business softwarae development. UNIX and Windows have provided that for about 30 and 15 years respectively now. The Mac has end user elegance, but that is it. A large chunk of iCloud is on Windows Azure if that gives and credence to my claim.

Side note: I don't necessarily think that complexity is a good thing and would rather like an 8-bit Z80 powered dark age for 20 years.

sriramk• 14 years ago

donkey.net is a demo meant to show off VB features when VS 2003 (or 2005) was released. If I remember, primarily used to show off Managed DirectX. Not a valid comparison.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

Digging deeper, we have this little gem: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Choice quote: "From the perspective of the Macintosh that we were already in the midst of bringing to life, it seemed like ancient history the day it came out."

And this is typical of companies taking the wrong approach (trying to release the perfect product rather than the minimum viable product). IBM and Microsoft got the product out fast, iterated, and generally executed better than Apple for two decades because of this. The sour grapes were palpable any time Steve spoke of Bill.

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

"Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written."

Bill Gates sold open source software! Incredible!

orjan• 14 years ago

Just because you can read the source doesn't mean it's open source. You can get access to read the Windows source as well, that doesn't make it open source.

gizmo• 14 years ago

Donkey Source:

http://drivey.com/DONKEYQB.BAS.html

ben1040• 14 years ago

Luckily someone has already brought GORILLAS.BAS to the iPhone:

http://gorillas.lyndir.com/demo

bkaid• 14 years ago

Interesting that the iOS download is .5mb, which is the lowest I ever remember seeing. And probably 50x the size of the original version.

icebraining3• 14 years ago

And probably 50x the size of the original version.

Actually it's closer to 120x ;)

tzs• 14 years ago

Altair BASIC was Gates' masterpiece. DONKEY.BAS was probably just a quick throwaway.

joejohnson• 14 years ago

From the article comments:

If Bill was really that smart he would have realized that on a road track having larger front wheels would be important. His car is more appropriate for the drag strip not a road race. I guess he didn't have a proper beta test or proper user review before publication.

Annoys me when donkey killing software isn't realistic.

mdekkers• 14 years ago

I think his masterpiece is having persuaded a lot of very, very rich people to give away huge chunks of money to charity, and the amount of money he gives away to various charitable causes himself, and being personally involved in making sure it is used in the right way.

Bill Gates' masterpiece, DONKEY.BAS, finally available for iPhone

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