Would the defaults be swappable without rewriting it all?
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.
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".
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).
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.
Thank you for this image :D
I am glad that VB served you well.
As ChatGPT said to me one day: happy hacking! :-)
Even today there is no WinUI3 GUI designer for C++.
Desktop computing era is over now :(
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
> 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!)
jaguar32 and master32, :) swapping bas files was the only way I could actually do difficult stuff in the beginning
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.
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.
And why didn't Bill ever include the VB runtime with Windows?
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
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.
Shout out to former VISBAS email list subscribers, that was a fun community.
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.
Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.1, 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.