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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Ooh, nice to see my project here. I was the lead developer of Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "visual" side of Visual Basic.

Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.

Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.

I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them.

AMA.

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I'll echo others, VB was my start. The year I decided to take programming in high school, they switched from Java to VB. I had so much fun in that class going above and beyond in all my projects.

When I was a kid, I used to sneak off to the computer lab and just play with the form builder. I had no idea how to code at the time but it was fun making mockups

VB on Windows 3.1 was my first intro to programming, thanks for your work!

I've always wondered where the "Thunder" prefix for VB's window class names came from (ThunderForm, ThunderButton, ThunderListBox, etc). Do you know who came up with it and if there's any fun meaning behind the name?

Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on.

"Thunder" was the code name that Microsoft adopted for Ruby/VB early on. Its tagline was "The Power to Crack Windows".

As you know, window class names existed in a global namespace, so you needed some kind of hopefully-unique prefix or something to avoid collisions.

Did you ever happen to see an early VB version with "GSK_" prefixes on window class names and such? My colleague Gary S. Kratkin developed much of the forms editor, so he used his initials as the disambiguator.

It was a tradition back then to use your initials like this. Mark Zbikowski may be the most famous example. To this day, every Windows EXE file begins with his initials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable

Here is an article from Scott Ferguson about Thunder:

https://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html

And a great long-form article from Ryan Lucas of Retool:

https://retool.com/visual-basic

For the curious, that article has the origin story of "fire an event".

I also want to mention Frank Raab and Mark Merker, who both did a ton of work on Ruby, and of course Alan Cooper gets credit for coming up with the idea and developing his Tripod prototype.

> Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on.

Oh, then you should know that there are still VB6 apps in heavy use being actively maintained out in the world. I'm working on a treasury management system that is in use by 90+ banks in my country, where the bulk of the app is still VB-based (we're moving to C# but it will be many years still before we can say a complete goodbye to VB).

Very insightful. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks for sharing this awesome lore.

I have to join others in this thread to acknowledge the impact VB had on my life as well. My first paying gig was on a Visual Basic 6 codebase, good times and good money for a 14yo. Thanks!

Your LinkedIn is the most impressive thing I've ever seen. Love the bit from Apple:

> I developed an electronic mail gateway for the Macintosh, featuring scriptability in a FORTH-based language.

(Also How to Lie with Statistics is my favorite book!)

You helped a lot of people get into programming, including me. So thanks for your contribution!

I learned VB4 or 5 at college in 98. The teacher did nothing while we sat through MS videos where a bearded man both poured water from one jug to another and taught me how to code. Magical stuff.

> where a bearded man both poured water from one jug to another and taught me how to code.

Thank you for this image :D

> Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.

Was it meant to compete with Norton Desktop? Norton Desktop had an extremely powerful built-in visual scripting language that resembled Visual Basic, so powerful it's strange that it wasn't a separate product. I learned about this from https://youtube.com/watch?v=iD7AezjG5YE&t=25m52s.

Thank you for making hacking on AOL punters and proggies accessible to a middle school kid in the 90s. Your project is the reason I’ve made an entire career of writing code.

likewise man. for me it started with Gorillas.bas and a curiosity of what all this text meant and how it pertained to throwing bananas across a skyline. that later turned into VB3 and AOL. the rest is history. what a fun time in nerdy history. thanks Stratoscope, thanks Steve Case!

Holy shit, I never heard anyone talk about GORILLA.BAS. It's also the first code I ever read, in 8th grade algebra class w/ Mr. Seaman (serious).

I didn't have a computer so I wrote a lot of BASIC in composition books, instead. I never got to run any of that code.

Also DOS32.BAS represent! VB6 was all I wanted to do when I got my first PC. It took me like a month to download a warez copy overnight with a download resumer. My dad wouldn't let me use the phone line during the day.

I used vb6 to make about 15k in high school in a slightly unsavory way.

I'm learning rust now.

It was bothering me that you had written GORILLAS.BAS as I remembered it as GORILLA.BAS. I hadn't seen it in 27 years, at least, so I wasn't confident. Anyway today I had a look, and we're both right.

The game was called GORILLAS, but was in a source file GORILLA.BAS

Published in 1991, 32 years ago. Dang. It was pretty new source when I read it. At the time, I figured it was old.

Same :> I enjoyed this bit of nostalgia: https://github.com/readme/featured/aol-programming-culture Remember jaguar32.bas?

What a great read! Thanks for sharing. Trip down memory lane to a very happy time in my life.

jaguar32 and master32, :) swapping bas files was the only way I could actually do difficult stuff in the beginning

Thanks! I graduated from qbasic to vb in the late 90s, and it was my swiss army knife of app and game development for many years.

What did you and they imagine a built-in, programmable shell would accomplish?

Would the defaults be swappable without rewriting it all?

The state-of-the art Windows shell at the time was the MS-DOS Executive:

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/MS-DOS_Executive

Alan's idea was that your desktop could be customized to your needs, either by yourself or by an IT group. Say you're rolling out machines to an accounting team: the Windows desktop would have tools right on it to make those team member's jobs easier.

Or you could make your own desktop tools with a few clicks and maybe a bit of scripting.

In the end, Microsoft decided to go with Program Manager and File Manager for the "shell" and turn Ruby into application development tool.

Apple: Develops something close to the perfect desktop UI on their first go.

Microsoft: "I know! We'll let users create their own UI! What could possibly go wrong?"

That Ruby ended up the way it did was an example of what they call "cooler heads prevailing".

Apple released something similar called HyperCard in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard, allowing users to create their own UI.

HyperCard was not intended to enable users to change the shell UI. Ruby was, originally.

What's the fundamental difference? HyperCard apps had minimal chrome and were fully customizable.

I haven't had a programming experience that was as pleasurable as visual VB. Thank you for your contribution.

Loved VB. I met Alan Cooper ages ago. Are you still in touch?

And why didn't Bill ever include the VB runtime with Windows?

Wow what an honor! VB really got me of the ground (after a short endeavor with QBASIC) and I loved it! I have to say though that in terms of creating an UI it kind of messed me up: When later studying CS and was asked to create a UI based project in Java I really did not understand what was going on: All students in my team thought it was "normal" that you would hardcore not only the functionality of a button but also it's position, color etc. From VBA I was used to just drag and drop, press F5 and enjoy! Same goes for debugging via terminal outputs... Anyways, many thanks to you (and others) - VB really got me hooked

Thanks @Stratoscope. VB paid my rent for 3-4 years, from version 3 to version 6. I've rarely felt so comfortable and at home in a programming language / environment.

Shout out to former VISBAS email list subscribers, that was a fun community.

Have you ever created a GUI interface in Visual Basic, and seen if you could track an IP address?

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU for the younguns)

Hey, I just want to drop by and say thanks! My dad started teaching me programming when I was six years old, using VB6 and a big lesson binder he brought home from work. I wouldn't be where I am without that, and the visual component and instant feedback were so important to making programming accessible and exciting to a little kid.

Why Microsoft was never able to come up with Borland C++Builder competitor? i.e. RAD for C++.

Even today there is no WinUI3 GUI designer for C++.

VC++ was pretty good. I have good memories with VC++ 6. At that time borland was mostly following MS - or as I thought. I liked MS approach much better than anything else in the market.

Desktop computing era is over now :(

The VC6 IDE was nice as a code editor and debugger and the compiler was a bit better than C++ Builder's, but that is only as far as it goes. When it came to making desktop GUI applications C++ Builder was lightyears ahead of VC6. In fact it still is, it is much easier to make a desktop GUI application[0] in the very first version of C++ Builder than it is on the very latest version of Visual C++.

The VCL framework combined with the visual editor in C++ Builder[1] are way more advanced than anything Microsoft has made available for (regular[2]) C++ developers targeting the windows desktop.

[0] as long as you don't care about the fact it'll use some old versions of GUI controls, though a manifest resource can fix that

[1] and Delphi, where it really came from

[2] i do not count using Managed C++ or whatever .NET based, those are different beasts

No question, I just wanted to thank you for your work on what became VB. I'm still using VB6 to pay the bills today, believe it or not!

nice work! i spent a lot of time learning to program using VB 1.0 for Windows (i could hardly wait and bought it as soon as it came out). it was so fast and lightweight compared with the alternatives. being able to call external DLL files was also quite useful.

Thank you, especially for being such an early adopter.

I am glad that VB served you well.

As ChatGPT said to me one day: happy hacking! :-)

My dude. I taught VB 6 as well as Visual FoxPro in rural Kenya as part of the KASNEB/KNEC national standards.

The immediacy of feedback in these platforms was responsible for many of the enlightened and motivated faces in those classrooms.

Your contributions have global reach and we thank you for them.

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