DONKEY.BAS

Coding Horror brings back some nice memories today. I remember my dad’s old computer in the basement, maybe around 1990. It was a beastly thing, living its life displaying the command line and only occasionally dropping into a colorful shell manager. In general, I didn’t have much more interest in computers, as a five-year old, than simply coming downstairs to see what Dad was up to. But I remember the first time he tried to spark my interest with an honest to goodness computer game. Understand that these were hard to come by in the early 90s in the Ray household, so I didn’t really know what I was missing. Three colors? Animation? Donkeys?! I was hooked.

Anyway, as it turns out, DONKEYS.BAS was an early program written to show off Advanced BASIC’s capabilities in 1981. Co-authored by Bill Gates himself, in fact. Who knew?

As a postscript, here‘s the source code. I delved into BASIC myself a little bit a few years down the road, using Q-BASIC (a version of the ancient programming language that had been wrangled into running under Windows 95, and was past its own prime by the time I encountered it). Looking back, I can vaguely trace how the program’s meant to run by looking at its code. I regret — a little — that my own programming experience never escaped BASIC, or my twelfth birthday.