0x0A│ 2026.05.04│ 0 min read │ visual-basic · history · programming-history · retro · meta · evilgeniuslabs │ history (v3)
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on the parts of the story that don't get covered.
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I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
Visual Basic 1.0 shipped on May 20, 1991, which makes the project I started this week thirty-five years late. That's part of why I started it.
The other part is that the histories of Visual Basic that exist tend to do one of two things. They focus on Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and the Microsoft management story, which has been written a hundred times by people with much better access than me, and which I have nothing new to add to. Or they focus on the language itself as a technical artifact, which is fine but skips the people who actually shipped the thing. Neither of those is what I want to read.
What I want is the lineage and the people. Where the language came from. Why Microsoft made the calls it made. Who the developers actually were, especially the ones outside the Gates orbit who get a footnote when they should get a chapter. So that's what I'm writing.
The whole thing lives on the site as a Book, A history of Visual Basic, with chapters of articles. Chapter 1 is now up.
What's in Chapter 1, Origins (1964–1992)
Six articles, read in order. They cover the period from the founding of Dartmouth BASIC through the September 1992 release of Visual Basic 1.0 for MS-DOS, with the May 1991 launch of VB/Windows in the middle.
- The birth of BASIC, and the decade before Microsoft (1964–1975). Dartmouth's Kemeny and Kurtz, the eleven years of commercial BASIC on minicomputers (GE, HP, DEC BASIC-PLUS, Tymshare, CompuServe) before Microsoft existed, and the five-million-BASIC-programmers estimate that anchors the whole series.
- Gates, Allen, and the Microsoft BASIC dynasty (1975–1991). Microsoft's sixteen-year BASIC run from Altair through IBM ROM BASIC, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, BASIC PDS, and QBasic, and why "BASIC" in "Visual Basic" was non-negotiable as a brand by 1990.
- Alan Cooper and Tripod (1985–1988). The California developer who built a drag-and-drop Windows shell on his own time, demoed it to Gates in March 1988, sold it to Microsoft, and is the reason VB has a form designer at all. Includes the obligatory clarification that Microsoft's Ruby is not the same Ruby as the programming language. Different gemstone, same name, half a decade and the Pacific apart.
- Project Thunder, Ruby meets Embedded Basic (1989–1991). The internal Microsoft codename for what became Visual Basic. The Microsoft-side team (Scott Ferguson as architect, with Adam Rauch, Chris Fraley, and Brian Lewis) and the August 1989 decision that turned a rejected shell tool plus an embeddable BASIC interpreter into a shipping product.
- The propaganda, Microsoft pitches the future of programming (1989–1991). Gates' May 1989 BYTE Magazine piece that seeded the launch pitch eighteen months in advance, the Windows World '91 demo on May 20, 1991, the three-part marketing claim, and the $199 price point that turned a tooling release into a wave.
- The two roads forward, VB/Windows and VB/DOS (1991–1992). Why Microsoft shipped two products called Visual Basic, descended from completely different code bases, in seventeen months. The DOS branch dying inside a year. The order most retrospectives get wrong.
What I'm deliberately not covering
A note on scope, because it'll come up. I'm not writing about Bill Gates, Paul Allen, or the Microsoft executive layer beyond what's structurally necessary to explain why the company made the calls it made. Those stories are already in Hard Drive, Idea Man, Showstopper, the Cringely books, and several decades of trade press. I have nothing original to add and no interest in repeating what better writers have already written.
What I do want is the people who don't get covered. Cooper gets named in everything but treated as a single sentence. Mark Merker, Gary Kratkin, Mike Geary, Frank Raab, the Tripod-era team, show up as a footnote in the few sources that mention them at all. Scott Ferguson wrote his own history of the Microsoft-side team and barely anyone has read it. Greg Whitten, the chief BASIC architect at Microsoft for years and the GW in GW-BASIC, is an entry on Wikipedia. There's a chapter or two of book in just those names alone, and I plan to write it.
Chapter 2 is going to start covering version-by-version detail (VB2, VB3, the VBX ecosystem). A later chapter will be Notable Characters, a directory of the lesser-known people who actually built VB over the years, including the ones still working on it inside Microsoft today.
How this is structured on the site
The Book is the canonical version. Articles, revision trails, table of contents, comments per article, eventually an epub or pdf export when the spine is solid enough to print. The blog posts (this one, and the launch pieces for future chapters) are companions: they don't duplicate the chapter content, they announce it, frame the editorial choices, and surface the bits that surprised me during research.
If you want to read it cover-to-cover later: the Book. If you want to see new chapters drop in the RSS feed and weigh in in the comments as they ship: subscribe to the blog. Both surfaces work.
Why now
I've been around long enough to remember writing my first VB1 application in 1991, on a 386 with Windows 3.0 and a copy of Programming Windows I'd already given up on reading. VB was the first development environment that felt like the computer was on my side. There's a version of the personal history where I'd be writing about VB6 and never get round to where it came from. This series is the version where I do the homework first.
Chapter 1, Origins (1964–1992), is up. Chapter 2 starts soon.
-EG