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Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

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Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#11

Post by pythonistah »

vmarsy wrote: post #7
pyromine wrote: post #2

Here's a wiki link[0] for anyone else that didn't know what they were looking at. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS

> "We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen." This is odd that these comments aren't in the github source code, is it missing something? Why does it starts at line 940? 940 REM The IBM Personal Computer Donkey 950 REM Version 1.10 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982 960 REM Licensed Material - Program Property of IBM

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#13

Post by vmarsy »

Artoemius wrote: post #10
vmarsy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen." This is odd that these comments aren't in the github source code, is it missing something? Why does it starts at line 940? 940 REM The IBM Personal Computer Donkey 950 REM Version 1.10 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982 960 REM Licensed Material - Program Property of IBM

> The first version of DONKEY.BAS was released in 1981, followed by version 1.10 in 1982 This is the improved 1982 version.

I see. I thought they'd have kept the authors name, unless the code was completely rewritten.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#17

Post by colejohnson66 »

pythonistah wrote: post #11
vmarsy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen." This is odd that these comments aren't in the github source code, is it missing something? Why does it starts at line 940? 940 REM The IBM Personal Computer Donkey 950 REM Version 1.10 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982 960 REM Licensed Material - Program Property of IBM

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this:

    10 PRINT "1"
    30 PRINT "2"
    20 GOTO 10
What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#18

Post by mbrock »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #5

I never played or even saw Donkey. Too young. But I learned to program by playing and modifying Microsoft Nibbles -- which is still my favourite snake game. And possibly my favourite Microsoft product. And QBasic is still the only IDE that I ever really liked . Although there are some newer ones that I respect .

Same here, and GORILLAS.BAS too. QBASIC was brilliant.

There's something about an immersive fullscreen coding tool with offline documentation built in.

The other environments I've really loved were Lisp in Emacs and Java in IDEA...

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#19

Post by allenu »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #17
pythonistah wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this: 10 PRINT "1" 30 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

It gets run in the correct order. Think of each line as a command that stores the instruction immediately at that line number. You could actually "re-type" a line later by reusing the same line number but replacing it with new contents.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#20

Post by webtechgal »

pythonistah wrote: post #11
vmarsy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen." This is odd that these comments aren't in the github source code, is it missing something? Why does it starts at line 940? 940 REM The IBM Personal Computer Donkey 950 REM Version 1.10 (C)Copyright IBM Corp 1981, 1982 960 REM Licensed Material - Program Property of IBM

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Well noted. I recall there also used to be a STEP command in the basic interpreter (basica and gw-basic) with which the line number increment could be set e.g. STEP 5 will auto-increment the line numbers by 5. (The default used to be 10.)
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