road. As the car avoids donkeys, it moves slowly up the screen, giving the player less time to react when donkeys appear. If the car avoids enough donkeys, the player receives a point and the car is moved back to the bottom of the road. The game displays the number of points earned by the player and donkey, but does not end or change when a particular score is reached. The Esc key quits the game. Sprites are rendered slightly differently between the QBasic interpreter and the original IBM BASICA/GW-BASIC interpreter. Development When IBM was developing its personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980, it contracted Microsoft to develop an operating system and a version of the BASIC programming language to release with the new computer. The operating system was released as IBM PC DOS when included with IBM PCs and MS-DOS when sold separately by Microsoft. Both included versions of Microsoft BASIC. DONKEY.BAS was written by Bill Gates and Neil Konzen to demonstrate the IBM PC and the BASIC programming language's capability to produce interactive programs with color graphics and sound. The game continues to generate interest, in part because of the involvement of Gates at a time when Microsoft was relatively small and only six years old. According to a speech delivered by Gates in 2001: Apple's Andy Hertzfeld mentioned the game in a description of the Macintosh team's reaction to the 1981 IBM PC purchased for them by Steve Jobs "to dissect and evaluate," noting that the new computer shipped with "some games written in BASIC that were especially embarrassing:" The first version of DONKEY.BAS was released in 1981, followed by version 1.10 in 1982. The operating systems with which the game was first distributed still work on modern computers with compatible BIOS and 5.25-inch floppy drives; however, IBM BASICA which ran the program under PC DOS 1.x requires ROM-based IBM Cassette BASIC, which modern computers do not have. The source code is still available. The game may be played with the GW-BASIC (original code) or QBasic (adapted code) interpreters or in compiled form (see "external links" below). Legacy As a programming example for the new platform and Visual Basic programming language, in 2001 Microsoft developed a game called in homage to DONKEY.BAS. It is a three-dimensional driving game in which the aim is to hit donkeys. The game demonstrates to programmers how a application