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Programming Windows: Visual Basic Beginnings (Premium) -

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by Paul Thurrott
9-11 minutes

Visual Basic 1.0 running on Windows 3.0

“In many ways, the Windows environment has been very hostile to the developer.”
-- Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates

As you may recall, Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft specifically to bring BASIC to the first
personal computer. Over time, Microsoft grew this business by expanding into more programming languages
and to more personal computers. Then, it expanded into productivity applications and operating systems.
When IBM introduced its first personal computer, the PC, in 1981 it shipped with Microsoft’s disk operating
system, which it called PC-DOS, and with Microsoft BASIC.

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Concurrent to this, Apple was developing the first Macintosh, and it contracted with Microsoft to get the firm’s
productivity applications and BASIC on the new computer. Released in 1984, the Macintosh wasn’t the first
computer with a GUI, or graphical user interface, and it wasn’t even the first Apple computer with a GUI, as
the Lisa debuted a year ahead of Mac. But it did popularize the GUI. And Microsoft, with its inside access to
the Macintosh in development, saw the future as clearly as did Apple. So it plotted to create its own GUI,
eventually called Windows, to secure its dominance as PCs moved from text-based command line systems
to GUIs with floating windows, mouse support, and inter-application data sharing.

Developed as a graphical operating environment that ran on top of DOS, Windows was first released in 1985
but was ignored by most PC users until the 1990 release of Windows 3.0. Part of the problem was that
Windows was somewhat unsophisticated compared to the Mac. But a bigger issue was that Windows
application development was exceedingly difficult. This was partially Microsoft’s fault: The Windows
application programming interface, or API, was cobbled together rather quickly and was not particularly
elegant. And as Windows evolved and improved from a user experience perspective, the tools developers
used to target this environment didn’t improve at the same pace.

Microsoft had other worries at the time. Competitors were bringing more sophisticated software development
tools to MS-DOS and Windows, and to competing platforms like CP/M-86, which became DR-DOS, and
OS/2, IBM’s take on a post-DOS future. Likewise, the software development landscape was changing, too.
Computer scientists had begun talking up a new way of developing software called Object-Oriented
Programming, or OOP. And with the rise of GUIs, toolmakers were starting to create application user
interface prototyping tools.

As the 1980s were drawing to a close, Microsoft began to explore both of these then-new developer
initiatives and the ways in which they could incorporate both into their own developer tools and fight off its
increasingly sophisticated competitors. I’ll be discussing OOP and Microsoft’s efforts in that field more
broadly in the near future, though they factor in here a bit too. But this story is really about rapid application
development, or RAD, which was Microsoft’s take on simple graphical tools for building application user
interfaces more easily than was ever possible before.

Microsoft couldn’t have done it alone, and it’s possible that the firm would have simply adapted QuickBasic to
Windows and that most application developers would have turned instead to more complication solutions
involving the C programming language and the Windows API. But then industry pioneer Alan Cooper paid a
visit to Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates in 1988. And that meeting changed software development
forever.

In the late 1970s, Cooper had contributed to a Microsoft BASIC competitor called CBASIC that ran on CP/M
and included a compiler. But he was also an early Windows convert, and he created a visual interface builder
in Windows called Ruby. (No relation to the modern Ruby programming language.) Some sources describe
Ruby as a programming language, but that is incorrect; in fact, a programming language is the one thing
Ruby was missing.

Instead, Ruby was a visual tool. It allowed a designer to drag and drop user interface controls onto a form to
construct the look and feel of an application window. It also supported extensibility through the addition of
external “gizmos,” which were essentially third-party controls that could extend the capabilities of the
generated application window.

Gates immediately saw the potential of Ruby and that it could dramatically simplify the process of Windows
application development by making user interface design a visual process rather than a programmatic one.

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And so he purchased Ruby for $1 million and handed it off to Tom Button, who had just joined Microsoft to
oversee the applications programmability team that was using its Basic toolset to make applications like
Word and Excel extensible. Button was told to combine Ruby and Basic into a single product which would be
called Visual Basic.

Curiously, Alan Cooper is today credited as the “father of Visual Basic.” That’s a bit of a stretch, in my
opinion, though it’s fair to say that Visual Basic would never have existed without Cooper. I would describe
Gates as the true father of Visual Basic, though Button deserves some mention as the person who brought it
to market. Indeed, Button oversaw Visual Basic development during its entire run over 6 major product
versions.

And it was magnificent.

Visual Basic was everything that C and Windows API development were not. It was visual. It was simple. It
was fun. Its code was not particularly sophisticated, but it got the job done. Most importantly, it opened up
Windows application programming to an incredibly large audience that included true beginners, enthusiasts,
and professional developers. It was a true “Volkslanguage.” With Visual Basic, anyone could write a
Windows application. And everyone did, it seemed.

“I was pretty surprised,” Cooper later said when asked what it was like to see his product transformed into
Visual Basic. “Microsoft did some great work. It’s like sending your kid to college and he comes back summa
cum laude, but he had a sex change operation. It took some getting used to.”

But Cooper was most impressed by how Gates had seen the future in Ruby and then made it happen.

“I thought I had written some pretty cool software,” he told the authors of Go To: The Story of the Math
Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts Who Were the Hero
Programmers of the Software Revolution. “That it would become the programming control panel that is at the
heart of Microsoft’s success today, I could never have imagined … That’s why Bill Gates is [who] he is
today.”

How important was Visual Basic? Even The New York Times reported about it, in June 1991, one month after
the product was released to an unsuspecting public.

“Visual Basic is a ‘stunning new miracle,’ raved Steve Gibson, an influential programmer who created the
Spinrite utilities for IBM personal computers,” The Times wrote. “‘The masterstroke of the decade,’ he added.
Stewart Alsop, an industry analyst whose opinion normally tends to scorn the IBM and clone PCs as inferior
to Macintosh and Next computers, hailed Visual Basic as ‘the perfect programming environment for the
1990s’.”

“And Charles Petzold, author of Programming Windows 3 ($29.95, Microsoft Press), said Visual Basic
‘revolutionizes Windows programming,’ adding: ‘For those of us who make our living explaining the
complexities of Windows development to programmers, Visual Basic poses a real threat to our livelihood. I
don't expect many commercial Windows applications to be coded in VB, but it's likely to be quite popular for
corporate, in-house development.”

Yep. Even Petzold weighed in.

“Visual Basic makes it relatively easy for novice programmers, as well as professionals, to create Windows
software,” The New York Times continued. “Those many people who break into a cold sweat when trying to
program their video cassette recorders may not fully appreciate the cries of passion that Visual Basic is

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eliciting from the dimly lit caverns where programmers often live … Programmers have had to learn such
difficult languages as C and C++ in order to write Windows applications. Not many people on a company
payroll can afford the time or aggravation needed to master them. As a result, Windows programmers are in
great demand, and thus expensive.”

Visual Basic wasn’t just the right tool, it arrived at exactly the right time, too.

Microsoft released Windows 3.0 in 1990 and it quickly sold 3 million copies in its first year as users
embraced the suddenly professional-looking and mature operating environment. Many developers initially
adopted Visual Basic thinking that they would use it to prototype applications or maybe just build application
frontends. But the $200 tool proved so useful on its own that many simply switched to Visual Basic
altogether. Basic had found a way to not just survive but thrive in the new decade of the 1990s.

“We are going to see over 10 times as many Windows applications written in the next year as we have in the
years past,” Gates said when Visual Basic 1.0 was released. In a rare example of the truth exceeding the
hyperbole, he probably undersold it.

Next up: A more detailed look at Visual Basic.

Tagged with Premium, Programming Windows, Visual Basic

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