Donkey.bas is a game that Bill Gates himself wrote

Now it is hard to believe in it, but in the days of Microsoft becoming , Bill Gates was a programmer. Proof of this is the DONKEY.BAS program written in BASIC, included in IBM DOS 1.10. The story of the fate of this little program was highlighted by Bill Gates himself on TechEd in 2001:

Ari Bixhorn: So, today we are here to celebrate a decade of powerful, effective and popular tool developers. Of course, I'm talking about Visual Basic.

Now, to help understand how long Visual Basic appeared, and how Basic really really appeared long ago, I want to go back 20 years ago and look at an application written in Basic. This application, called Donkey.bas, was written by none other than the gentleman standing to my left. Bill, how long have you written Donkey.bas?

Bill Gates: Indeed, me and Neil Konzen (Neil Konzen) sat behind this prototype IBM PC in a small room at 4 am. Programming required complete dedication and we locked ourselves in a closet. But now we had everything to start writing the program. Despite the fact that it was more than 37 degrees, by the night we wrote a small application that demonstrates the capabilities of the Basic on the IBM PC. It was Donkey.bas. It looked very exciting at the time.

Here you can look at the source code of the Donkey.bas program, and here you can download a 3D version of Donkey, written in VB.NET to illustrate progress over the past 20 years (2001 version).
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via Coding Horror .