Visual Basic 1.0 screen snap

Visual Basic (VB) is a programming language marketed by Microsoft Corporation. The system for connecting the programming language proper to the graphic user interface is a descendant of a system called Tripod, originally developed by Alan Cooper, and further developed by Cooper and his associates under contract to Microsoft. The internal language itself is a descendant of BASIC. It was first introduced by Microsoft in 1991 with the intention of making programing easier by having a visual basis for designing the user interface, and to some extent, the code.

Visual Basic 1.0 was released for DOS. The language itself was quite sparse, and the interface was barely graphical, using extended ASCII characters to simulate the appearance of a GUI. Visual Basic 2.0 through 3.0 were designed to be run within Microsoft Windows. They were 16-bit applications, and the programs produced by them were also 16-bit applications, ideally run under Windows 3.x. Visual Basic 4.0 was available as a 16-bit or a 32-bit version. The 32-bit version was more powerful, and ran on Windows 95. By version 5.0, Microsoft was releasing Visual Basic exclusively for 32-bit versions of Windows. Programmers who preferred to write 16-bit programs were pleased to find that Visual Basic 5.0 was able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0, and it was not difficult to convert Visual Basic 5.0 programs to be compatible with Visual Basic 4.0.