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.