

Bill Gates' masterpiece, DONKEY.BAS, finally available for iPhone - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2012/01/28/donkey-bas-is-back/

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RodgerTheGreat
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...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt)

~~~
contextfree
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...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/bill-gates-and-donkey-
bas.html):

"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
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.

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ben1040
Luckily someone has already brought GORILLAS.BAS to the iPhone:

<http://gorillas.lyndir.com/demo>

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

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gizmo
Donkey Source:

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

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mdekkers
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.

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joejohnson
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.

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

~~~
icebraining
_And probably 50x the size of the original version._

Actually it's closer to 120x ;)

