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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

We were all a lot younger when that photo was taken 25 years ago! :-)

Happy to answer any questions about the early days of VB. Gary and Frank and Mark and I built most of the "visual" side of VB based on Alan's Tripod prototype. It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was originally going to be a programmable shell for Windows 3.0 but turned into VB instead.

If you want something specific to blame me for, that would be the VBX interface...

Here's an article with more of the story of how Microsoft turned Ruby into VB:

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

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Back in the mid 90s, in my early- mid twenties, I built a software business on vb. Clients included financial services, government, and others. I even had a customer who connected my cv software to custom hardware. It was such a good product (I'm talking about vb). There definitely was snobbery compared to vc++, especially around the fact that it compiled into pcode. And the fact that I couldn't do my own dll's / ocx/ vbx. But the versatility and utility was amazing and I was able to create a nice bit of side income. If was my second business but my first software eating the world one. Wanted to use this opportunity to say thanks to you guys for such an awesome product!

Well thank you. It has to be one of the most gratifying things for a software developer to hear when people have used your code and built great things with it!

I just want to say thank you. VB was my first introduction to programming. I was in fourth grade and I asked my parents for VB6, and they thoughtfully also bought me "Visual Basic for Dummies." I was quickly hooked - I especially remember writing side scroller games with it and making the image sprites with Photoshop in my school's computer lab. I don't think I've written a line of VB since middle school, but I will always have fond memories of it.

Hi! I'll bite. Two questions for you.

VB and Hypercard get a lot of nostalgic love these days, and a lot of people (including ITT) maintain there aren't any real successors to them.

What would you consider to be the standout merits to Ruby/VB that ought to be reproduced now?

Second question, since plugins and dynamic extension are never out of style: in the VBX interface, what did you think worked well, and what did you think was a tremendous disaster?

Thanks!

Ah, if you're looking for insights, I may not have too many of those. It was a long time ago! But let me see what I can remember.

The big thing about VB is the obvious one: it was really easy to get started using it, and despite the flaws in the visual environment and the language itself, it was good enough to get things done.

In fact, Basic was a lot better than the language we were originally going to put in, which was barely more than a glorified batch language (and not even as powerful as .bat).

The idea we had at the beginning was that you'd drag an arrow on the screen from one component to another, signifying that an event triggered on the first component would make an action happen on the other. This is where the phrase "fire an event" came from: I was looking for a verb for this, and "trigger" didn't sound right. I was frustrated and had a bunch of rubber bands on the table, so I started firing them at the screen. That didn't help. So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use.

What worked well in VBX? Well again it was fairly simple to use and easy for people to make extensions with. The big disaster was that it was pretty much tied into the Win16 programming model, so when Windows moved to 32 bits, VBX wasn't going to cut it and Microsoft developed OCX to replace it.

So I fired up a doobie, and between flicking the lighter and firing the rubber bands, "fire an event" seemed like the phrase to use.

There's something strangely surreal and downright awesome about reading this comment from you, over 25 years later. Huge amounts of respect for what you and the team achieved.

Thank you! We always tried to have fun with the names.

Alas, my other favorite name didn't make it into the final product. VB Controls were called Gizmos in Ruby, and VBX was the Gizmo Interface.

I don't know what happened there - I think Gizmo was just not a serious enough name for the Microsoft of the day. But really, Control instead of Gizmo? Boring!

There is a successor for HyperCard these days. It has a similar language, it can import HyperCard stacks, it is crossplatform (windows, mac, linux, android and iOS) and it is open source. Its called LiveCode and is available at http://livecode.com

StackOverflow's VBX tag only has three questions. I guess that means it must be near to perfect...

Indeed! After all, who has any problems with VBX these days?

I also want to thank you. VB was the first language I learnt back in school days here in Pakistan. I later used it for almost a decade to make personal projects and some freelance before I finally went for CS degree and was taught more complicated concepts of CS.

As I understand it, VB 1.0 was effectively QB 8.0, as the last shipment of QB was the QB PDS 7.1. How much did the VB 1.0 codebase borrow from the existing QB implementations? Were they entirely independent projects?

I'm afraid I have no idea on that, sorry! Our team was just involved in VB before it became VB: we did the visual forms editor, VBX interface, and stuff like that. Microsoft then took it in-house and added Basic to it and updated a lot of other things. This article tells about that and may have some insights about the Basic code used:

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

I did my final year project at Uni in VB 1.0. I think my years on a Dragon 32 (TRS-80) gave me an advantage as it was all MS Basic.

Any plans to bring VB back? i.e. something as simple as the original was?

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