Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991) [video]

Ooh, nice to see my project here. I was the lead developer of Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the &quot;visual&quot; side of Visual Basic.<p>Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell&#x2F;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.<p>Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.<p>I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think &quot;gizmo&quot; was a much better name than &quot;control&quot; as Microsoft later called them.<p>AMA.

VB used to be one of the most important technologies in our field. No, it was never &quot;good&quot; nor &quot;elegant&quot;. But it allowed a huge humber small and medium businesses to benefit from computers. All those DVD&#x2F;VHS rental stores? VB. Line of business applications for government? VB.<p>Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write <i>useful applications</i> that powered the economy. This is something we often forget nowadays in the flood of frameworks, programming paradigms, microservices etc. Computers exist to serve humans, we must never lose the connection with how useful our systems are.

In 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong?

My dad actually worked at a startup (two programmers if I recall) in 1990 onward that wrote very similar software to MS Visual Basic and even has a BASIC derived language. It was called Realizer. They started working on this before MS announced VB, but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there was already similar software around. If I recall correctly, my dad was at a trade show and their booth was right next to Microsoft (whom he turned down an offer from the year prior to work at this startup instead).<p>Needless to say, we&#x27;re watching the video of a VB demo, not a Realizer one :)<p>I can&#x27;t find much online about the original Realizer, but there is a Wikipedia article for CA-Realizer, which was the version released after CA bought their company. CA-Realizer didn&#x27;t really go anywhere and my dad eventually left CA as well. Very cool story though, and a large reason I chose to work at small companies fresh out of college too.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CA-Realizer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CA-Realizer</a>

Linus Torvalds:<p>&gt; I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say its a bad language, and they&#x27;ve been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn&#x27;t a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fa...</a>

My dad introduced me to Visual Basic when I was 13 and it honestly changed the trajectory of my life. Prior to this I wasn&#x27;t overly interested in learning anything in particular. VB became a creative outlet and since that day I never stopped learning.<p>Loved hitting up PlanetSourceCode to get scripts and reverse engineer other peoples code to learn.<p>I built so many fun programs - the best of which was a chat programs using UDP so we could chat over the schools local network.

I started with VB 1.0 for DOS, (before that I used PDQ) and used VB all the way to 6.0 - I agree there hasn&#x27;t been anything like it since.<p>However some of the downsides included DLL hell and requiring 3rd party components for functions like TCP&#x2F;IP (IP-Works) and more advanced UI elements and so on. I remember investing quite a lot in such components - I recall componentsource.com as being a key marketplace. I think one of the main issues was OS integration, hooking into Win32 required all kinds of incantations. Decompilers were also an issue.<p>It brings back memories of a much simpler time in terms of development, especially the UI editor - it was so fast to just draw a few forms and hook them up to code. I used it a lot for statistics type interfaces, and CRUD type systems, however I wrote a P2P communication tool back in 2000 that even had VOIP. I also recall writing a game that wrapped OpenGL and running it on my SGI520 Windows NT box. So much fun.<p>I transitioned to .NET and C# and didn&#x27;t look back or bother with VBScript.<p>However I recall at the time feeling so abandoned by Microsoft, having to learn another complete system from scratch - existing projects didn&#x27;t come across cleanly.<p>Anyhow... just a bit of a greybeard rant about the &#x27;good old times&#x27;...<p>Just as an aside - after playing around with BBC Basic during covid, I was so impressed how OS calls were implemented in the language. If VB integrated with Win32 to the same level BBC basic integrates with RiscOS it would have been pretty much the perfect tool in my opinion.

VB blows everything else today out of the water. Most kids would lose interest when you mention the word environment or toolchain. Being able to visually draw a control and then click the control to add code to its events was the best motivator because the results were instant. I can not believe how bad kids have it these days trying to learn to make an iOS app for instance, about 100 lines of code for what would be 5-10 in VB.

This brings back fond memories... For those interested, someone has been working on a &quot;Visual Basic for Linux&quot; called Gambas (Gambas Almost Means BASic): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gambas.sourceforge.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;main.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gambas.sourceforge.net&#x2F;en&#x2F;main.html</a>

My first paid programming job was a VB6 app in ~2004 in high school. It was initially a volunteer thing for a local youth court assistance group but they paid us $100 at the end as a kind of surprise reward. The thing had a UI with the right tab movements and backed by mysql db, and even did correlation calculations for crime statistics.<p>I still have 1 VB app on my resume from way back then, I refuse to remove it!<p>And boy do I miss just making stupid games really really fast, and making actual productive applications also really really fast. I had made an HTML editor with previews, syntax highlighting (lol, my own &#x27;algorithm&#x27; haha), project management tools, and everything. I was so proud of that.<p>The base fond VB memories are the simple joy of starting a new project (before .NET called them Solutions) and making the thing I had in mind in like a couple hours. Really miss that.

VB is one of the only &quot;no code &#x2F; low code&quot; tools over the last 3-decades that worked at scale.

Not bad for a market bought as a dollar purchase:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt</a><p>(I bought a copy of Microsoft BASIC for Macintosh, and would have much rather had MacBasic)

Does anyone know why the VB was named so? it had nothing to do with BASIC language. The wiki page says &quot;Visual Basic was derived from BASIC&quot; but I don&#x27;t recall it being anything remotely close to BASIC. Or am I recollecting things wrongly? It has been 30 years :)

After QBasic, Visual Basic 3 on Windows 3.1 was my intro to programming.<p>Set aside the language syntax – the way that the IDE exposed all the UI properties to you was so enlightening. You couldn&#x27;t help but learn how Windows expected controls to work.

Related:<p><i>Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24435217">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24435217</a> - Sept 2020 (11 comments)

I think Excel + Visual Basic is some kind of fixed point.<p>If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend&#x2F;Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL.<p>Or the database + SQL will be your converged application

Visual Basic was the greatest visual development environment I have ever used. Modern Visual Studio tooling is also pretty awesome if you&#x27;re targeting Windows. I am less these days so do not have much use for this tool.

What a trip down memory lane (no pun intended)! Rest in peace, my WYSIWYG friend.<p>It was a rough ride bringing VB to the web. There was VB Active Server Pages, then VB.NET Webforms, which did not always produce the most performant or secure UI code. It was like an ornery bronco in the age of industry.<p>The concept of Viewstate was interesting and probably looked great in demo applications, but it was ultimately not the best way to avoid writing JavaScript. Sometimes it could be tamed, but for the sly cowboy, ruby on rails was the king of RAD.

The only place to buy VB 1.0 was an 800 number advertised in John Dvorak’s column in PC Info. I assume partners had access too, but it wasn’t on a shelf anywhere.<p>$99. I bought it instantly.

Something is probably difficult to find these days is a CEO that writes code, and probably even more difficult one that writes code live in front of the audience!

It&#x27;s 2023, the world had a collective brain hemorrhage and now prefer to define their GUIs via two seperate text files.

I think Excel + Visual Basic is some kind of fixed point.<p>If you iterate long enough on your self developed backend&#x2F;Frontend system to enable your BI department to work in their own with their data, it will eventually converge into something like a spreadsheet application with a custom DSL

Many people back in the day looked down upon Visual Basic development.<p>But you will never see once again the same development speed you could achieve with Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier.<p>The UI was instantaneously responsive, and the language had very low cognitive load.

I still remember showing a still image of this demo and discussing this at the Red Hat developer conference in 2019 in Vienna. I still think that Visual Basic was the real bicycle for the mind that brought computing to the masses!

I really miss VB and Flash. Wish we had something like that today.

now compare how UI development is done in the likes of react and such.<p>that app if done in react - would be so full of subtle bugs. and way slower too.<p>we really have regressed backwards as an industry.

Frontpage. Anyone?

Edgy, dissing on developer&#x27;s time.

Bill Gates demonstrates Retool (2024) &#x2F;s