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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

#111

Post by kabdib »

lanevorockz wrote: post #60
Jerry2 wrote: post #16

Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.

The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck. Decent sound on the PC finally became real and relatively well adopted in the early 1990s.

On the PC there were a lot of fights about standard ways to do things that just worked on the Mac: Memory expansion (that was a whole industry right there), graphics, networking, mice. Even the CPU needed a turbo button to work correctly. Just about the only piece of the PC that universally worked and didn't beg for improvement was the keyboard.

So you can argue that the "crappy PC" spawned a bunch of industries to fix things, while the Mac, which was a lot closer to perfection, only spawned small businesses to satisfy niche needs. Apple nearly died in the 1990s because the alternatives finally caught up to them, a decade later, and Apple couldn't satisfy the computing industry alone. Still can't, doesn't try.

But I had a PC (256K, two floppies) and I had a Mac, and I sold the Mac because I couldn't develop software on it without going crazy (early Mac development was pretty painful; at one point I was seriously considering FORTH, and I hate FORTH).

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

#112

Post by segmondy »

Why are people complaining that the game is bad? Really? Can we see what you wrote in 1982? Games like this were quickly hacked together to show the capabilities of the machine. It was done in BASIC for owner's of those machines to play with. If this was a commercial product, it would be written in assembly.

If anything, this was likely a demo of Microsoft BASIC, let's not forget that Bill Gate's first product was not an OS, but rather a BASIC interpreter written in 1975 for the Altair 8800, written in assembly on paper tape, without the actual hardware! This was written a good 5-7 years later.

While some may not like Bill Gates, he was probably a better programmer than most of you in his youth and this was before the Internet where it's now easy to get access to books, screencasts and lots of sample code via github. Give the man his respect.

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

#115

Post by gus_massa »

grhmc wrote: post #106

Could we fix the title?

(I agree.)

If you see a submission with a very bad title in the front page, you can ask the mods to change it with an email to hn@ycombinator.com

It's usually faster to use the email because sometimes the comments are unnoticed.

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

#117

Post by webtechgal »

WalterBright wrote: post #48
MawNicker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. Sort of. He mostly sounds like someone with experience on both platforms who is surprised by the dominance of the one that he considers inferior. His prominence as a developer isn't relevant. I trust that his ability is sufficient and that his experience with the platforms is actual. He is a suitable person to comment on the contrast between them.

Many people did dump on the PC as inferior, but it was a marvelous platform for tinkerers of every sort, and tinker they did. The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom. Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware. The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piec…

> The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!

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

#118

Post by o0-0o »

segmondy wrote: post #109
ebbv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think salty is the right word. Salt implies some kind of frustration and I don't think that's accurate here. I'd call it an honest, judgmental article.

salty is slang for "envious"

"Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :)

Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.

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

#119

Post by webtechgal »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #59
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add that some BASIC dialects had a RENUMBER or RENUM command that would change all line numbers and references to use a consistent interval. Without that, programs could become hard to modify due to the "gaps" between the lines closing-up.

Couldn't you just increment by 100? Or even 1000? Why did everyone use 10? Was it some interpreter limit that didn't allow line numbers above a certain amount (like 2^15 on a 16-bit CPU)?

I remember there being a STEP command to set the increment value. However, when I tested it (on the PCJS sim from the top of the thread) just now, its throwing a Syntax Error!! I am nearly sure that was what the command was, but I don't know what gives right now.

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

#120

Post by ArkyBeagle »

kabdib wrote: post #111
lanevorockz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.

The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistic…

The PC was much more used as a replacement for things previously done by minicomputers, at least in my field of vision. Just the differential in cost made for quite a business model.
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