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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Was a huge fan of the product. Joined the VB team as a PM in 1996 and worked for a few years while my health declined. The whole division was beautifully run. The people were, to a person, amazing human beings. I honestly think I stumbled into the best team Microsoft had before or since. The Microsoft campus was verdant and tranquil. Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and has never actually been the case at Apple. At the same time our first child was born. For me, it was a time of pure magic. All that and I got to work on VB.

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I don't know who approved the inclusion of VB in Word, but that person is a hero.

WordBasic was a career-maker for me. I worked at a Big-6 consulting firm and used Word to parse and rewrite thousands of SQL modules (that resided on a VAX, no less) with a Word macro when the DB structure changed. It ran for 11 hours and saved man-weeks.

That was after I had used WordBasic to add tons of features to Word for our doc team, which we take for granted today: cross-file searches, cross-file page numbering, style enforcement... just incredible.

It's sad to see the mess that Word has become, however. And Windows too.

I joined the VB/Ruby dev team in 1992, first as an intern and then full-time a couple years later and stayed in the team thru 1999 / VB6. I implemented the Data control and some of the data binding logic for VB 3.0. It was such a special team and code base - even 30 years later I still fondly remember my HDesks, HDeskrefs, and Gizmos. We tried hard to get the Ruby forms engine running on the (what became the) .NET/CLR runtime - but alas it was not to be.

Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?

We kept the Ruby forms engine as unmanaged code written in C/Win32/COM and tried to integrate it with Basic code compiled and running on the CLR, but it didn't work very well. There were a lot of problems back then (this was 25 years ago now, a couple years before .NET 1.0 shipped) with CLR/COM interop. One particular problem I recall was that the interop layer did not support calling event handlers via IDispatch which the Ruby forms engine required.

> Everything you sort of imagine Apple would be to work at was true on that team, and has never actually been the case at Apple.

I'm glad to hear your Microsoft experience was amazing. But as someone who worked at Apple during that time, this assertion is untrue and seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.

Agreed, and I apologize. I should have said I never met anyone who loved their experience at Apple. Thanks for catching that, and for doing it so civilly.

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