Six-article Chapter 1 traces Visual Basic’s origins from Dartmouth BASIC (1964) through VB/DOS (1992), focusing on overlooked developers like Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson.
Key Takeaways
Alan Cooper built drag-and-drop Windows shell Tripod independently, demoed it to Gates in March 1988, sold it to Microsoft – that’s where the VB form designer came from.
Project Thunder (internal codename) began August 1989 by combining Cooper’s rejected shell tool with an embeddable BASIC interpreter; Scott Ferguson was architect alongside Adam Rauch, Chris Fraley, and Brian Lewis.
Gates seeded the launch pitch 18 months early via a May 1989 BYTE Magazine piece; VB1 shipped May 20, 1991 at $199.
Microsoft shipped two incompatible VB codebases: VB/Windows (May 1991) and VB/DOS (September 1992); the DOS branch died within a year.
Greg Whitten, the GW in GW-BASIC and chief BASIC architect for years, gets only a Wikipedia entry – the series aims to correct that pattern.
Hacker News Comment Review
The dominant discussion is about the AI-generated banner image with misspelled text (“Darmouth”, mangled “Microsoft” on book spines) – commenters see it as a credibility signal against the project.
One commenter flags MacBasic and competing products like RealBasic as context gaps worth covering in the series.
Notable Comments
@jszymborski: “having poor AI images looks worse than having no images” – draws parallel to early-2000s clip art and reaction GIFs falling out of style.
