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?
"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.
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).