DONKEY.BAS: Bill Gates tries to create Xbox twenty years too early...

Good friend and fellow blogger Scott Bradford pointed out that today is the 30th anniversary of Microsoft giving MS-DOS its name. That was the main operating system for the vast majority of personal computers for many years, until it came to be supplanted in the mid-Nineties by Microsoft's own DOS-less Windows software (even though every version of Windows since Win95 has had the original style DOS window available to open, just like the old days).

Well, 1981 was another landmark year for Microsoft, though it's the kind of history that Bill Gates would no doubt just as well wish nobody would remember! It was in 1981 that Gates and fellow programmer Neil Konzen wrote DONKEY.BAS. This was the very first video game that Microsoft would ever produce for commercial retail. It was packed in the early versions of MS-DOS, as a way to sorta "show off" the IBM PC architecture's power along with that of the BASIC programming language. Legend has it that Gates and Konzen were working in a hot, sweaty room one Sunday afternoon at Microsoft HQ when they came up with this thing.

So here is the game they produced: Donkey. It's a rudimentary driving game, so named because the "cow" that the driver had to avoid hitting ended up looking more like a donkey. So it became Donkey...

I've read numerous accounts over the years about how Apple's staff broke out into hysterical laughter when they saw DONKEY.BAS in action. And it's not hard to understand why. But in retrospect, DONKEY.BAS is pretty neat in the sense that twenty years later, Microsoft would be rolling out the Xbox and come to dominate home video gaming (a trend that continues with the Xbox 360).

Aim here to read more about DONKEY.BAS at Wikipedia.

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Bill Gates wants to control the weather

In his never-ending bid to become just like C. Montgomery Burns, Microsoft founder and world's richest geek Bill Gates has hatched a diabolical plot to destroy hurricanes.

Ummmmmm... Gates and his gang haven't exactly thought this out very well, have they?

For all the damage and death that hurricanes cause, they do accomplish some good. They are a mechanism that keep the oceans from over-heating. And isn't drastic climate change something that the allegedly "enlightened" among us are trying to prevent?

This (literally) crazy scheme, if it actually gets implemented, will no doubt do far more harm than good... and probably in the short term even before the long-range ramifications become apparent.

Hey Bill, I'm one of the few people out here who isn't complaining about Vista and I'm also a die-hard junkie of your Xbox 360. But this is one realm of things that you need to leave well enough alone.

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Bill Gates pours out plague of mosquitoes on captive audience

This has been one of the most hyperactive days for crazy news. First it was the "Klingon convenience store robberies", then the zombie street signs. Now this...

At some kind of pretentious pow-wow called TED, Bill Gates spoke to the audience about the efforts his foundation is undertaking to wipe out malaria. But being not content to deliver a simple speech, Gates engaged in some rather disturbing performance art... and unleashed a swarm of mosquitoes on the assembly of technocrats. "Not only poor people should experience this!", Gates declared, as he released his airborne vector of blood-sucking insects at the crowd.

Doesn't this come awfully close to being an act of biological terrorism? I mean, it's not too far a stretch from this stupid stunt by Gates, to purposefully introducing mosquitoes laden with weapon-grade pathogens into a major metropolitan area.

And then again, some people will say that Bill Gates has been disseminating bugs all his career, so why should this be any different...

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