I'm trying for Visual Basic 6 to show up on GitHub someday.

networked 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

VB6 is as stretch, but I'd love to see Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 for MS-DOS open-sourced. It is the only DOS version of Visual Basic. What is remarkable about VB for DOS is that it's a complete text-mode RAD IDE [1] for TUIs. There is no TUI builder that I know of like it. It is obscure and barely discussed by retrocomputing enthusiasts. Your best resource outside of early-1990s books and magazines is a 2020 blog post [2] that demonstrates building a "Hello, world!" project with screenshots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface_build...

[2] https://www.cloudwisp.com/exploring-visual-basic-1-0-for-ms-...

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tom_ 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Add me to the VB for DOS fan club! I was a user in the mid to late 90s. TurboVision was beyond me at the time (I didn't really know Pascal well at all, and I wasn't good enough at C++), but VB for DOS was just the ticket (mostly) - the language was not terrible, and the form designer was super easy to use. Much easier than me attempting to recreate a nice text UI in C. I wrote a few programs in it.

I do recall the 640 KB barrier being a limitation. I've forgotten the exact details, but, as I recall, the docs implied it shouldn't generally be an issue - but in practice it was. And it'd always be a problem at the most annoying time.

(But it could just have been some large model thing that experienced real mode fiends would instinctively know to avoid? Coming from a 68000 background, for DOS stuff I'd used Borland's huge model or a DOS extender of some kind, to avoid the segmentation one way or another. Maybe that was the problem.)

Despite the occasional problems I had, I always generally liked it, and felt the UIs I created with it looked really rather nice.

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qingcharles 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's wild that it passed me by. I've never seen that before. I used the Windows version from 1.0, but all my main development was still in TUI apps like Borland until about 1995.

Funny that the DOS version came out after the Windows one.

It amuses me that I'm sat here at my desktop right now using the exact same interface in Visual Studio 34 years later to build a WinForms app.

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asdefghyk 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 for MSDOS -

Sounds like competitor For Vermont Views or the previous product Windows for Data and windows for C

No sure of the names ... my recollection this software was in use in early 90s and maybe late 80s

	▲	asdefghyk 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Google of 3 words Vermont Views, software still picks up several links Borland Turbo Pascal and Borland Delphi where also (similar) products from around that time. These products where popular at the time. ( The development system provide include some kind of windows system for the application ) Microsoft even hired key Delphi person ....

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6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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hu3 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. This got me smiling, from some days ago:

Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# – complete with form designer and IDE in browser

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42105869

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giancarlostoro 6 days ago | parent [-]

I would honestly spend money to get access to the VB6 source if that's what it takes to get Microsoft to fund open sourcing it. One key thing was that VB6 was the first version that wasn't using P-Code but was actually compiling natively into an EXE.

I like to imagine that there was actually a VB7 in the works with a lot of enhancements to VB6 that we just never got to see once Microsoft dropped .NET and made VB .NET a thing.

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int_19h 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

VB5 was the first version with native .exe generation. Although P-code vs native didn't make as much of a difference as one might think because the generated code was really slow; not in the ballpark of Delphi even.

The amusing thing about native VB is that Win32 is still, to this day, carrying a bunch of APIs (Var*) that essentially encode its semantics on Variants, e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/oleauto/...

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WorldMaker 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The first VB.NET release was versioned VB7, every hint we have shows that the team at Microsoft felt they were building the next version of VB. Given VB6's deep reliance on OCX/ActiveX, .NET was seen as the future of that and the fix for a lot of the bugs and problems of OCX/ActiveX.

	▲	int_19h 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, VB6 was essentially BASIC with OLE Automation object model bolted on. (Which itself was designed to a large extent to match what VB was doing before, so it's a bit circular). And let's not forget that .NET grew out of the "COM 2.0" project. Which started in 1998, at the same time VB6 was released.