A game of crushing donkeys. Good, to avoid them, even if we almost always ended up being crushed. With a vehicle that looks like an F1 car, it’s actually a tractor. And There you go. This is what Bill Gates has scheduled, during an uninterrupted workday until the wee hours of the morning. The legend of Silicon Valley, between fine irony and disaster. But let’s take a few steps back to explain what it is.
In 1980, Microsoft was a young to start up in the shadow of an apple that was growing by leaps and bounds. This offspring founded with Paul Allen was barely five years old. Bill Gates wanted to demonstrate what a small PC was capable of by simply using the BASIC language to 86-DOS. And he knew perfectly well what a machine was capable of and where its limits were.
Everything went well. The DOS software ended up being sold to IMB for $430,000. And during that time, they quietly acquired the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products. But in the fine print of this contract with IBM, there was a clause, an additional requirement: a BASIC version for beginners as well as a handful of very simple games to illustrate the advantages of this language. We are of course talking about a system with 8 KB of memory. And this is how Bill Gates created, in a few hours, “DONKEY.BAS”.
“The most embarrassing game in history”
“Donkey” is the name of the game, yes. The BAS extension is because it was simply written in BASIC. During the 2001 partners’ conference, Bill Gates summed up the adventure as follows:
“Neil Konzen and I were at 4 a.m. with the IBM PC prototype, sitting in a small room. They insisted that we close the door. We only had one cupboard with a lock, so we had to do all the fittings there and it was still over 37°C. But we were coding late into the night on this little application to demonstrate what “BASIC” could do.
Yes it was DONKEY.BAS. At that time it was very exciting“.
However, there was an Apple specialist who, upon seeing this, could not contain his anger. Andy Hertzfeld, one of Apple’s first employees along with Chris Espinosa and Bill Fernandez, didn’t hesitate to say what he thought: “DONKEY.BAS is the most embarrassing game I’ve ever seen. The game’s concept is as bad as t he crude graphics it uses
But his reaction was more to surprise you when you saw who was behind this programming. It was this fact that confirmed to him that this match was the result of haste and bad decisions:
“However, there was an Apple specialist who, upon seeing this, could not contain his bad mood. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the first Apple employees with a teenage hacker whom I met through his work on Apple II (later becoming technical manager of Microsoft). We were surprised that such a bad game could be co-written by the co-founder of Microsoftand I would really like to take credit for my comments.”
The funny thing about this story is that Microsoft went ahead with this little piece of history. In 2001, a 3D version of “DONKEY.BAS” called “DONKEY.NET” was created. Even MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) hosts a browser-based copy. The most ironic thing about this whole game came to iTunes a decade later: “Donkey.App” is a mobile game available for iOS and watchOS for 0.99 dollars. We can still find it.
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