Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

And there were things in this general direction... Smalltalk and Logo spring to mind.

But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving branches on one tree, when 30-40 years ago there was a whole forest.

The branches are Windows (which now means NT) and Unix (which now means Linux and macOS). They both grow out of the same stump: DEC's minicomputers, specifically DEC's 16-bit line.

DEC also had 12-bit, 18-bit, 20-bit, 24-bit and 36-bit lines, all profoundly deeply unlike anything that ever ran C.

And of course there were lots of other minicomputer and mainframe brands that were far far more different than that: Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation (CDC), RCA, General Electric, and Honeywell. Once known as "IBM and the seven dwarves".

All we have left descends from one branch: DEC 16-bit machines.

The rest is mostly gone. Some are still around, emulated and in maintenance mode, because they run the world's banking systems and air-traffic control and things. Kinda important.

There are whole families of languages and OSes that never used a single line of C or involved any Unix code at all at any point. Whole types of OS and GUI and editor and filesystem and so on more different from Unix than Unix is different from Windows NT.

Whereas today, the traditional Mac is totally gone, replaced by Unix. And Windows is getting more Unix-like all the time and now includes a choice of Unix and two different Linux runtimes.

Suggest that, hey, let's run Smalltalk on the bare metal and teach kids on that, so that they don't even have to ever know what "a file" is or means, and people will say "that's crazy talk!"

Remember the Blues Brothers? "We got both kinds of music! Country AND Western!"

Well, we got both kinds of software today! Unix AND Windows!

They are the same damned thing, and gods help you if you are some heretic that says hey, you know, there are other things out there...

MS tried to embrace, extend and extinguish Java. It got blocked in court.

So, instead, it pushed .NET instead. "If it ain't dot-net, it ain't worth sh*t."

So everything that wasn't dot-net was killed.

Real VB loved by millions? Dead. QBasic, QuickBasic, Quick C? Dead. FoxPro, a good dBase clone, the database of choice for millions of businesses worldwide in the '70s, '80s and '90s? Dead. FrontPage, democratising the web for millions? Dead. HTML is dead, use ASP.net.

The OS for the machine Linus Torvalds started on, the Sinclair QL, was called QDOS as a pun.

The original codename for 86DOS, which became MS-DOS and made Microsoft rich, was also QDOS, for the same reason.

Because cue-doss sounds like "kudos".

I think this is one of the things detractors of VB kinda miss. You could build quite sophisticated software to leverage COM/DCOM without needing to go full C/C++ and IDL.

The place I worked at built software that ran inside Microsoft Transaction Server (latterly COM+) to exploit distributed transactions.

And then there's the really "advanced" stuff you could do in VB as written about by Matthew Curland in his excellent book "Advanced Visual Basic 6: Power Techniques for Everyday Programs"[0]. Armed with a copy of Curland's book and Don Box's "Essential COM" you could be really dangerous :)

[0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Advanced-Visual-Basic-Programming-D...