I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

WillAdams•about 2 hours ago

One thing which I'd be interested in being contextualized is the story of MacBasic:

https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

and how other competing products such as RealBasic (somewhere I have a book on it) factored in.

vunderba•3 days ago

Why on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project?

If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:

- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.

- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.

- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.

Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.

[1] - https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/uploads/content/2026/05/6fd5a7b327...

aaronbrethorst•about 2 hours ago

MICROSOFT MARL was definitely my all-time favorite product from Microsoft.

vunderba•about 1 hour ago

hahaha. IIRC Microsoft MARL is good friends with Microsoft BLOB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

andrelaszlo•about 1 hour ago

I enjoyed programming |fsuAI Bact1lon|, but I only got started with version 5.

selimthegrim•about 1 hour ago

The little-known predecessor to the Xbox and Surface, except for landscape architecture.

wrs•about 2 hours ago

My first impression was that the text style is dismayingly like either an AI wrote most of it or (to be charitable) the author’s writing has been heavily influenced by the current generation of LLM output. So the image style goes perfectly with it.

jszymborski•about 2 hours ago

It won't be long before people realize that having poor AI images looks worse than having no images, in the same way that having a reaction GIF every other paragraph of a blog post fell out of style or deeply generic and unillustrative clip art or stock photos of puzzle pieces or featureless-white-3D-figure-with-hard-hat-holding-question-mark.

I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.

bluedino•about 1 hour ago

I'm scared of the floppy disk used to load Visual Baction

booleandilemma•about 2 hours ago

Get used to it. This is the future we've created for ourselves. It's only going to get worse as people everywhere try to use AI to distinguish themselves. Expect everyone to be an artist, everyone to be an author, everyone to be a programmer. Slop. It's what's for dinner.

SilentM68•11 minutes ago

Excellent Idea :)

VB was practical and useful at the time, especially as a learning tool in school. I enjoyed testing the competitors that arose to emulate its abilities, including RapidQ Basic, Envelope Basic (a.k.a Phoenix Object Basic), some of which are documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

I think it would be cool to see a Documentary on programming languages, e.g. their history, rivalries, successes and downfalls, of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. If it is made correctly, with humor, it could be entertaining, perhaps even profitable.

koniferous•about 2 hours ago

Excited to read the rest of this! Keep it up

I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up

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