The Inside Story of Visual Basic, the Programming Language That Made Windows Possible
Software designer Alan Cooper explains why they call him the ‘Father of Visual Basic’
Since my interaction design firm, Cooper, has had new owners now for more than two years, it’s not surprising to find that some of my more personal Web postings have been quietly removed from Cooper dot com. One casualty was an essay I originally wrote and posted in 1995 that tells the origin story of Visual Basic. I am reposting it here with slight updates from the original piece I wrote 25 years ago.
Mitchell Waite called me the “father of Visual Basic” in the foreword to what I believe was the first book ever published for Visual Basic (VB), called Visual Basic How-To (now in multiple editions, published by The Waite Group Press). I thought the appellation was an appropriate one and frequently use the quoted phrase as my one-line biography.
During the 1980s, my business consisted of inventing software and then selling it to publishers. In 1986, I adopted Microsoft Windows as my platform of choice. Not only did it do all of the expected GUI support things, but it had a unique and extremely desirable feature: using its dynamic link library (DLL) feature, you could create tools that configured themselves dynamically. The instant I learned this, I knew Windows would have a huge and successful future. I learned one other very important fact about Windows at that time: Its shell program was terrible.
Microsoft’s original shell, called MSDOS.EXE, was extremely stupid, and it was one of the main stumbling blocks to the initial success of Windows.
In my spare time, I immediately began to write a better shell program than the one Windows came with. I called it “Tripod.” Microsoft’s original shell, called MSDOS.EXE, was extremely stupid, and it was one of the main stumbling blocks to the initial success of Windows. Tripod attempted to solve the problem by being easier to use and…
