Bill Gates' masterpiece, DONKEY.BAS, finally available for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

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

technologizer.com

54 pointstechnologizer20 comments

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...

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!"

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.

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.

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.

"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!

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.

Officially published or leaked? What does it mean that 'open source is ot Opn Source' just because Donkey.bas was published a couple of years before FSF foundation or didn't comply some rules?

Microsoft makes the Windows kernel source available to a number of entities [0], but this source is not to be distributed freely. Open Source is usually construed to mean that the source, if you have it, can be distributed to freely.

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/windowslp.ms...

You can get official Windows source, under restrictive conditions. Mainly used by governments, and some other large organizations.

The rest of your question is somewhat confusing.

Nitpick: Open Source is defined by the Open Source Initiative[1] (OSI), not by the FSF, which defines "Free Software".

In fact, "Open Source" was defined specifically as a way to drop the philosophical and ethical approach of "Free Software".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

I didn't said it was free in any sense.

Parent is using the OSI's definition of open source.

[1]: http://www.opensource.org/

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

http://gorillas.lyndir.com/demo

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

Donkey Source:

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

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.

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.

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

And probably 50x the size of the original version.

Actually it's closer to 120x ;)

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