Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
In the early 90s I was working in downtown Seattle. The manager of the project I was on was married to a product manager at Microsoft. One morning he showed up with a beta copy of VB 3.0.There was a young, brilliant, programmer, James Shields, who was my partner working on a project. We took one look at VB3 and both immediately saw the potential of vbxes.At lunch we came up with a couple of initial ideas for custom controls, wrote them, and began selling them on Compuserve for $5 each.Soon I wrote some controls for working with the just-released Sound Blaster card, which gained some interest on Compuserve's music-related forums, I actually traded messages with Jerry Garcia one night.But our first big hit was Message Hook which I wrote to overcome some of the limitations of using the Windows API when using VB. That lead to Mitch Waite (publisher of many popular computer books in those days) contacting me to revise the Visual Basic How To. The result was the Visual Basic 3.0 How-To, which was almost all entirely new material.My approach to writing that book was to think about the things that one would want to program in Windows apps but could not easily accomplish with Visual Basic ... and to solve those problems. Message Hook featured heavily, a copy was included with the book's diskette.Soon enough the internet came online and I wrote a number of internet controls which allowed thousands of Visual Basic programmers to add, primarily, email and ftp to their programs, however there were controls for more obscure protocols as well.Visual Basic 3.0 was magic! It was an entirely new idea and several companies, including Mabry Software which was founded by me and my programmer buddy, had a good business until .net blew up the entire ecosystem.I think it's probably fair to say that VB 3.0, and our internet controls, made a significant contribution to the evolution of the internet.