The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

How Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. The Spring of 1988 In the spring of 1988, Alan Cooper sat in front of a computer in a large boardroom at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, patiently waiting for Bill Gates to arrive. At the time, Cooper's main business was writing desktop application software to sell to publishers. “I was one of the first companies to realize that you could retail software without needing to sell a computer,” he recalls. But for the past month, Cooper had been frantically coding in preparation for this Microsoft demo, adding last-minute features to Tripod, a shell construction set for the Windows operating system that he'd been working on as a side project. In late 1985 or early 1986, a friend had brought Cooper to Microsoft's annual technical conference in Silicon Valley. On stage was Steve Ballmer, presenti ... Read full article.