Neil Konzen

Neil Konzen was one of Microsoft's earliest employees and was in charge of their Macintosh porting projects.

Originally an Apple II programmer, he was hired by Microsoft and was responsible for porting many Microsoft products to Macintosh, such as Microsoft Word. It was also thanks to Konzen Microsoft was able to make Microsoft Windows based on information Konzen learned while working at Apple. Steve Jobs later filed a lawsuit in 1988 over this, but due to a technicality Konzen's contributions to Windows based on information he had gained from Apple was declared legal.

On a more amusing note, Neil Konzen and Bill Gates were discovered to be the authors of a subpar computer game called Donkey, which folklore.org writer Andy Hertzfield described as:

The most embarrassing game was a lo-res graphics driving game called "Donkey". The player was supposed to be driving a car down a slowly scrolling, poorly rendered "road", and could hit the space bar to toggle the jerky motion. Every once in a while, a brown blob would fill the screen, which was supposed to be a donkey manifesting in the middle of the road. If you didn't hit the space bar in time, you would crash into the donkey and lose the game.

We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen. Neil was a bright teenage hacker who I knew from his work on the Apple II (who would later become Microsoft's technical lead on the Mac project) but we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.