One of the things I remember about the PC and the Mac at this time was that someone (Chris Espinosa?) counted the chips on the video card of the PC and found out that it had far more chips than the entire Mac motherboard!

I found another account of Donkey in a conversation between Bill Gates and Bixhorn... for those who might want a little more history about "Donkey.bas": ARI BIXHORN: Now, to help set the context for just how far Visual Basic has come and really how far the Basic language has come, I'd like to take a step back just a few years and look at an application that was written in Basic. This application, called Donkey.bas was actually written by none other than the gentleman standing to the left of me. Bill, how long ago was it that you wrote Donkey.bas? BILL GATES: Actually, it was myself and Neil Thompson at four in the morning with this prototype IBM PC sitting in this small room. IBM insisted that we had to have a lock on the door and we only had this closet that had a lock on it, so we had to do all our development in there and it was always over 100 degrees, but we wrote late at night a little application to show what the Basic built into the IBM PC could do. And so that was Donkey.bas. It was at the time very thrilling. So go ahead and show them what that looks like. ARI BIXHORN: Let's go ahead and take a look at Donkey.bas. This is back in the day where the Basic language still had line numbers. We still had great constructs like "gotos" and I think that the development environment speaks for itself. But to really see how cutting edge Donkey.bas was, let's go ahead and run it. (Laughter.) And as we can see, the goal of Donkey.bas is quite simply -- or not so simply to avoid the Donkeys. (Laughter.) Okay, well as we can see Donkey.bas is a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. (Laughter, applause.) The full interview is at http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2001/06-19teched.asp

Here it is! (A PC executable, running with QuickBasic.) http://drivey.com/DONKEYQB.EXE Courtesy http://drivey.com/ - a minimalist driving simulator.

I recorded a quick video of this horrible game a few years ago, you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fsizWFVpFY#t=6m51s

"The 8088 was a decent processor compared to the 6502, but it paled next to the 68000 we were using in the Mac." PC came out in 1981, first Mac came out in 1984.

@Phoebus66: > In short the IBM hardware and that MS-Dos software were a > perfect match that would set te mark on everything that followed > in its path: Unvisionary Compartmentalized Brute Force design > methodology. The PC is the exact opposite of compartmentalized. The Project Chess team was deliberately organized to be completely open internally, but completely separated from the usual IBM vertical integration. And that's why they designed an open-architecture computer with off-the-shelf parts. And that's why it succeeded. For the rest, sure; as Don Estridge himself put it, "Many… said that there was nothing technologically new in this machine. That was the best news we could have had; we actually had done what we had set out to do." IBM's own marketing acknowledged that it was less powerful than or more expensive than most of its established competitors, but it was "The IBM of personal computers", with all that entails. @David Charlap: > … the IBM PC was developed in a year's time as a proof of > concept (IBM typically took 5 years to bring a product from > concept to market.) It was released as a stopgap to get a > toehold in the market while the "real" personal computer was > developed for later release. The PC was not intended as a stopgap to get a toehold in the market. IBM had decided that it was too late to get into the PC market, and it probably wasn't worth it anyway, until Bill Lowe convinced John Opel to give him a chance. It wasn't a proof of concept; Lowe claimed that they really could get to market in a year—and they actually did so. There was no "real" PC planned to be released later; it was Project Chess or nothing. And the PC ended up being pretty much what Lowe envisioned from the start (well, from the point where they rejected his idea of buying Atari and selling a slightly spiffed-up Atari 800 as an IBM). > And finally, MS-DOS was an act of desperation by Microsoft. > They promised IBM an OS when they had none. They bought > QD-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, changed just enough > to make it run on the IBM machine and shipped the results. Buying 86-DOS (not QD-DOS; that's an entirely different thing—you may be thinking QDOS, the original name for 86-DOS?) wasn't an act of desperation, it was the plan from the start. Bill Gates told IBM about 86-DOS in their contract meeting, suggesting that he could license and port it as a stripped-down CP/M clone that IBM could sell for a lot less than CP/M. And that's exactly what he did. And it wasn't a stopgap for a "real" OS that Microsoft had planned but couldn't get done in time. The real OS already existed—CP/M-86—and it was an option from the day the PC was released, and it had nothing to do with Microsoft.

One reason the PC board was very ugly had to do with industry standards at the time. The industry had somehow settled on 40 pins max for a chip. Pins are metal wires which stick out from the chip, and connect the silicon to the rest of the board. The 8088 adhered to this standard. This created an issue, because when you add 20 pins for address and 8 pins for data and then various other control pins, you quickly get more than 40 pins. The Intel engineers solved this problem by "overlapping" 8 data pins with the 20 address pins. This was clever, but immediately caused board designers to include complicated glue chips to handle this dual pin use. The processor would send the 20 bit address on the 20 pins. The board designer would then have to "capture" this address externally, because the address would then disappear as the pins switched to either receiving or sending data. The 68000 solved this a different way. They realized the 40 pin limit would eventually have to be broken because Moore's law would require it, as processors got wider. This is why they chose to use 64 pins for the 68000. It added to the cost of board design, but because you needed far fewer glue chips it probably saved money overall. Today it is funny to think about this, as chips have 100's and 100's of "pins". Since most chips are surface mounted now, they actually have pads and not pins. Here is the pinout for the 8088: https://www.cpu-world.com/info/Pinouts/8088.html Here is the pinout for the 68000: https://www.cpu-world.com/info/Pinouts/68000.html Notice the 68000 has 24 pins for address and 16 separate pins for data. While the 8088 has 20 pins for address where the first 8 can also be used for data (ad0 - ad7)