Long-form VB history on EvilGeniusLabs.ca; Chapter 1 covers Dartmouth BASIC (1964) through VB 1.0 for MS-DOS (1992), foregrounding Alan Cooper, Scott Ferguson, and the teams Gates orbit left as footnotes.
Key Takeaways
Six articles in Chapter 1 trace the lineage from Kemeny and Kurtz through Altair BASIC, QuickBASIC, and the May 20, 1991 VB/Windows launch.
Alan Cooper built drag-and-drop shell Tripod independently, demoed it to Gates in March 1988, and sold it to Microsoft – his form designer became VB’s core UI model.
Project Thunder (codename) merged Cooper’s rejected Ruby shell with an embeddable BASIC interpreter in August 1989; Scott Ferguson architected the result.
Gates pre-seeded the VB launch pitch in a May 1989 BYTE Magazine piece – 18 months before the product shipped at $199.
VB/Windows and VB/DOS shipped from entirely separate codebases 17 months apart; the DOS branch died within a year, an order most retrospectives get wrong.
Hacker News Comment Review
Site navigation to the actual chapter content is broken for many readers; the book’s canonical URL is evilgeniuslabs.ca/books/visual-basic-history, not linked clearly from the announcement post.
Commenters flagged the AI-generated banner image as counterproductive: misspelled “Microsoft” on book spines, “Darmouth” instead of Dartmouth – eroding credibility on a history project where accuracy is the entire pitch.
VB6 open-source demand surfaced immediately; at least one commenter is stuck maintaining VB6 industrial software in manufacturing where TwinBasic is inadequate and a VB.NET migration is not feasible.
Notable Comments
@cm2187: Links an Alan Cooper interview on YouTube covering his Ruby demo to Gates – direct primary-source complement to the article’s Cooper chapter.
@WillAdams: Asks for MacBasic and RealBasic contextualization, pointing to the Folklore.org MacBasic piece as a gap in the planned six-article scope.
