History of Visual Basic

In the Fall of 1964, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System became operational with BASIC (Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) as the principle language for student program development. Developed by John Kemeny (once Albert Einstein's research assistant, later president of Dartmouth College, and chairman of the commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident) and Tom Kurtz, together with lots of help from undergraduates.

Their efforts were further developed by Paul Allen and William Gates in 1975. This cooperation on the development of a BASIC language for the Altair personal computer paved a way for the Microsoft Corporation, a major player in computer software.

The MITS (Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800 is one of the earliest commercially available personal computers. Ed Roberts sold these machines along with radio-controlled models by mail-order from the MITS factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1975, Paul Allen (then a Honeywell employee) and Bill Gates (a student at Harvard) decided to write a programming language to run on the Altair. They wrote a scaled down version of BASIC, and thus began Microsoft (the company).  MITS was much less fortunate. It could never recover from its cash flow troubles. By 1977 Ed Roberts sold his company and followed his true passion by returning to medicine.

Gates and Allen then ported Basic to other platforms and moved back to their hometown of Seattle where they had attended grade school together. It was at this time that the Microsoft Corporation began it's reign in the PC world. By the late 70's, BASIC had been ported to platforms such as the Apple, Commodore, and Atari computers and now it was time for Bill Gates' DOS (digital operating system) which came with a BASIC interpreter.

The IBM-DOS version of this interpreter became known as BASIC A, and at the time IBM was in major competition with clones so it was setup to require the BIOS (basic input-output operating system) distributed with IBM computers. The version distributed with MS-DOS was GW-BASIC and ran on any machine that could run DOS. There were no differences between BASIC-A and GW-BASIC which seems to make IBM's idea useless.

Microsoft realized just how popular their BASIC interpreter was and decided to distribute a compiler so users could code programs that ran without an interpreter. QuickBasic was the solution Microsoft came up with. It was distributed through the years until version 4.5.

At this time Microsoft decided to release a product with more kick and started distributing PDS BASIC (Professional Development System) and ended it with version 7.1 (Also called QuickBasic Extended), PDS was a short lived idea and was not followed through to its true capabilities - although it was an improvement over QB4.5.

Microsoft got hooked on GUI's (graphical user interfaces) and started in both the DOS and WIN Visual Basic versions of Visual Basic. The DOS version was ended at 1.0 with a professional update, Differences between VB for DOS and QB are not as much as one might think, in fact VB still compiles QB4.5 code and the professional edition will compile PDS7.1 Code.

Microsoft released Visual Basic in 1987. It was the first visual development tool from Microsoft, and it was to compete with C, C++, Pascal, and other well-known programming languages. From the start, Visual Basic wasn't a hit. It wasn't until release 2.0 in 1991 that people really discovered the potential of the language, and with release 3.0 it had become the fastest-growing programming language on the market.

Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, followed by VB.Net 2002 in 2002 and VB.Net 2003 in 2003.

The latest version (as of 5-27-06) is Visual Basic 2005, released in late 2005.