IBM PC Oddities
Posted by Benj Edwards | Thursday, August 11, 2011
Donkey Magic
When I said Microsoft Adventure was the “very first PC game” earlier, I was only half correct. Sure, it was the first one you could buy in a store. But the first game many new IBM PC owners played was DONKEY.BAS.
With the help of Microsoft employee Neil Konzen, Bill Gates himself coded this whimsical donkey-avoidance game in a late-night session on an PC prototype. It came as a demo program with disk BASIC, which shipped with PC DOS in the early years. Nibbles and Gorillas, both BASIC programs themselves, took the place of DONKEY.BAS in 1991’s MS-DOS 5.0.
(Image: Microsoft)
August 11th, 2011 at 8:07 pm
What about IBM's word processing software, Display Write 1.0? It's hard to find any good information on this product on the internet. I even remember the name of the executable "dw1" 🙂
August 12th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
What's bizzare and dystopian about teaching people to read? I say it's utopian. Now if they subliminally taught them to only buy IBM or become chimp plant lackeys… that would be dystopian.
October 23rd, 2011 at 9:57 pm
I think the author was just showing how limited his/her vocabulary is. …ah, if only they had access to one of those evil IBM enslavement machines during their youth.