I found a copy of Donkey online a few years back. The code did include Bill Gate’s name as one of the authors. At the time I also had a 286 still lying around that worked, but the floppy was bad. I ended up typing the source in on the 286 and ran it. It worked quite well, relatively speaking. It was rather amusing to see Bill Gate’s name in the source and I wondered if it was actually him. I think I still have that 286 somewhere, hmm…
This was the first game my 4 year old ever played. He loved it.
I knew Bill Gates in college ('72-75) and used to tease him about his late nights hunched over a PDP-10 terminal writing code for “hobbyist micros”. He was a damned good programmer.
For a game written in Basic in 1981, this isn’t really that bad.
Ah.
Let me tell you a little story. About 5 years ago I was up in New York working for a small financial services company. Our CIO who we had just hired was a former MITS guy who worked with Ed Roberts “back in the day”, and was essentially the interface between BillG and MITS way back when.
So one day, my birthday rolls around (it’s June 10th – it’s OK if you get me a gift) and he shows up at my desk with this huge stack of paper in one of these old 70’s looking binders. I’m thumbing through it all, and it’s a code listing – PDP-8 (or 11? I forget) assembly code. Pages and pages of it. I had no idea what I was looking at. He says, “Happy Birthday.” I give him a puzzled look. He says, “Look at the top of the page.” And there, sure enough, “Microsoft BASIC 1.0 By Bill Gates and Paul Allen”.
“Holy Crap! Is this my birthday present?” (tongue in cheek)
“Your birthday present was that you got to SEE it.”
Still a great and memorable birthday present. I can’t believe he saved it all these years, especially in the late 70’s and early 80’s. But now it’s got to be worth at least a hundred large or two. That looked like code to be proud of.
Well, may be I could hate uncle Bill as much as you do all together, but… I’m a two-legged donkey old enough to remember the time where graphical modes didn’t exist, and people having a Hercules graphic card, 2bits depth (monochrome!), on a green phosphore screen were the kings. I wonder what could do many modern programmers with such a technology, where showing data on screen was not as easy as dropping components and then calling “form1.Load”. “Wow, I’m the best!!”- says today the omnipresent lamer, after writing 20 lines of code. I think history is always valuable, doesn’t deserve to laugh to.
“Heh… ragging on a quick sample program Gates wrote in a couple hours is exactly the kind of douchebaggery I’ve come to expect from Mac users. ;)”
Except the ragging didn’t come from Mac Users. Well in a way it did. They were Mac CREATORS. From back in the day when you didn’t have the crutch of a framework and a bug in your code meant stopping production on the chips and starting over. 
My very first programming experience was with bananas… Ah, simpler times. 
@jhn I was referring to the quote from the Macintosh people, not this article.
@Scott So you’re saying Mac creators are as big of douchebags as Mac users?
Yeah, Gates was a programmer. Who do you think wrote the conversion of Dartmouth Basic for the trash 80’s, Apple II’s, "Commodors, etc. Where do you think Digital Research went to get and license their CPM Basic?
Gates; thats who and he is the guy that wrote the original Basic interpreter that was adapted to those machines…
Don’t forget Microsoft was orginally in the supplying Basic interpreters game, OS and applications came later…
By the way, ever try to program anything of significance on an 8 bit processor with 16K of memover and 60k of floppy (two if you could afford it). Now try to program anything significant with graphics in it. You better know assembler.
I tell, you young programmers don’t know how easy you have it. Most of the grunt work is already taken care of for you so you can simply type something like Move mySprite (X, Y) instead of a couple of thousand:
LDA H1024
LDX H1028
MOV X, H1030
…
By the way, what do you think Gates wrote the interpreters in? Assembler.
A particular one I recall was a skier
Perhaps an early SkiFree?
Anyone remember the game bananas? It was a physics about gorillas slinging bananas, pretty cool!
Yep, it was!
Viewer.vb, Line 98:
Private DonkeysHit As Integer = 0
Of course, VB isn’t case-sensitive…
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It’s a painful reminder of how BASIC programming is, not how programming was in 1981. At the time, you could still have chosen Lisp or (god forbid) C instead
I think the point is that it’s probably one of the worst videogames ever made.
Jeff, you imply that all programming in 1981 was awkward.
What about Smalltalk an Lisp? They both predate MS Basic, and they are generally considered as being among the most elegant programming languages.
It’s a pretty fugly game and a worthless time waster. But back in the early 80s I probably would have spent at least a couple of days playing it. Any better and you would have paid a quarter to play it!
Does anybody have a cell-phone or PDA port in Java yet?
To be honest, I think most of the negative boo-hiss comments about Bill coding are just out of spite.
If he some 20+ years ago took part in coding some BASIC language demonstration, which looks awful by todays standards, it doesn’t mean it was that bad at the time - as a demo.
Its not like they were developing a commercial game for sales etc. It’s just something demonstrating BASIC language at the time.
Those of us who actually worked on programming/computers at the time, know what it was like and how games looked 20 years ago. Remember those source code printouts in magazines that you had to type into your machine? Yes, that kind of stuff.
Press play on tape
and best regards,
Tommi
What’s scary is how few lines of code it took! Look at the size of the .NET download. This is PROGRESS?!