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Another is Bill Gates Visual Basic 1.0 demo

It was revolutionary. Before that, making a Windows GUI was pretty low level with calls to C APIs and callbacks and registrations.

Visual Basic changed all that with point and drag and drop and you could make a GUI in a matter of minutes.

https://youtu.be/Fh_UDQnboRw

⬐ intrepidsoldier

The original LowCode demo.

⬐ protomyth

Steve Jobs NeXT development demos were out before 1991.

⬐ WillDeAth

Having Visual Basic as the first language I ever wrote, this is awesome to see the pitch!

What I find funny is that in the next video recommended to me [0] Gates demonstrates something we used to do daily in the 90s but the indistry still hasn't figured out how to do it properly with web technologies.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh_UDQnboRw

⬐ gabrielsroka

This came up just recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24435217

> I absolutely love Visual Basic and am trying to make a Javascript version at appshare.co

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21734845

⬐ smileypete

This video is pretty lengthy but well worth a watch; the oral history of Alan Cooper, the 'father of Visual Basic'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtGFgaKYI0

EDIT: One highlight is where Alan Cooper gets a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft for calling himself 'The Father of Visual Basic'...

https://youtu.be/-wtGFgaKYI0?t=9666

⬐ zubairq

I absolutely love Visual Basic and am trying to make a Javascript version at appshare.co

⬐ sktrdie

This shows me that coding hasn't evolved at all over the last 30 years.

⬐ apostacy

Visual Basic was one of the first languages I learned, and I was able to quickly make complex graphical applications.

I feel like we have regressed in a lot of ways.

Contrast building a GUI app in 1990 vs 2020.

Compare Visual Basic to something like React Native.

How much code would you have to write for some basic business application, like having a few screens that share a state, and interface with a database? How big would the executable be?

Visual Basic had some big flaws, but you could work around those flaws. And I can also explain the logic of a Visual Basic program fairly easily to someone inexperienced. And there is just so much less cognitive load involved. I feel like 90% of the actual code that I wrote was for actually processing data. Sure, asynchronous stuff could get difficult in VB, but that was the exception. And I wish that VB had had reducers.

I am certain that virtualizing the x86 Visual Basic 6 runtime in Javascript would easier to develop for and outperform many modern GUI frameworks today.

⬐ anakaine

this is the comment that hits the nail on the head. Cognitive load.

I know well there are many good reasons to be on modern languages, but vb did make things easy.

⬐ vb6sp6

I do quite a bit of work in vb6 still. It is fast and easy to use. I really wish Microsoft would make vb7.

⬐ PostThisTooFast

The '90s were full of ballyhoo about object orientation and "soon we'll be bolting together software with off-the-shelf components."

Thanks to the failure to standardize C++ ABIs (among other reasons) that didn't happen... except for VBXs. You really could throw together a CRUD app pretty quickly with off-the-shelf VBX controls.

⬐ nomel

My favorite part about Visual Basic was the help files. They were absolutely great for someone learning to code. From what I remember, there was a snippet of example code for basically everything.

⬐ anakaine

This is how I learned to code. Ot was excellent. Its been very hard over the course of my career to learn other non basic languages, and I attribute it largely to those help files being so good that it became my first and main language.

⬐ ranqet

Had the same experience. First language I learned was VB and felt like I had to learn programming all over again when moving on.

⬐ nomel

I learned basic first, then microcontroller ASM, which made C just kinda make sense when I went to it.