Fun_People Archive
15 Jul
Donkey?

Date: Fri, 15 Jul 94 13:41:23 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Donkey?

[You'll never guess where this is going... -psl]

Forwarded-by: bostic@vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Sam.Cramer@3do.com (Sam Cramer)
From: an interview with Andy Hertzfeld, (member of the original Mac team),
      in the March 7 1994 "MicroTimes".

Q: When you were doing the Mac, there was this sort of undercurrent of you
were doing it right and the rest of the world, especially IBM, was going it
wrong.

A: That emerged as more of a marketing thing after the Mac was done. I
think it's fair to say that we essentially ignored -- we didn't think
of the IBM PC as competition for the Mac, because it was clearly
inferior, basically.  [laughs]  We weren't looking at that; in no way
was it a stalking horse.

We did get one in August of '81 when it came out.  Steve [Jobs] was
often tight with money, but he approved us rushing out and buying a 64K
original IBM PC.  We took it all apart.

We just made jokes about it, more or less.  The funniest joke I remember
was this game it came with called Donkey.  It was this horrible low-res
graphics game -- it was a very clunky car game, and this donkey would
appear at the road, and if you didn't push the button at the right time
you'd crash into the donkey.

It was so poorly implemented, the whole concept of it was so bad, that
we thought it was funny, until -- because it was a BASIC program you
could list it out, and we saw it was written by Bill Gates himself!

And that made us think it was doubly funny.  Not even by himself, Bill
Gates and someone else.

© 1994 Peter Langston