Programming Windows: Visual Basic Beginnings (Premium)

“In many ways, the Windows environment has been very hostile to the developer.”
-- Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates
As you may recall, Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft specifically to bring BASIC to the first personal computer. Over time, Microsoft grew this business by expanding into more programming languages and to more personal computers. Then, it expanded into productivity applications and operating systems. When IBM introduced its first personal computer, the PC, in 1981 it shipped with Microsoft’s disk operating system, which it called PC-DOS, and with Microsoft BASIC.

Concurrent to this, Apple was developing the first Macintosh, and it contracted with Microsoft to get the firm’s productivity applications and BASIC on the new computer. Released in 1984, the Macintosh wasn’t the first computer with a GUI, or graphical user interface, and it wasn’t even the first Apple computer with a GUI, as the Lisa debuted a year ahead of Mac. But it did popularize the GUI. And Microsoft, with its inside access to the Macintosh in development, saw the future as clearly as did Apple. So it plotted to create its own GUI, eventually called Windows, to secure its dominance as PCs moved from text-based command line systems to GUIs with floating windows, mouse support, and inter-application data sharing.

Developed as a graphical operating environment that ran on top of DOS, Windows was first released in 1985 but was ignored by most PC users until the 1990 release of Windows 3.0. Part of the problem was that Windows was somewhat unsophisticated compared to the Mac. But a bigger issue was that Windows application development was exceedingly difficult. This was partially Microsoft’s fault: The Windows application programming interface, or API, was cobbled together rather quickly and was not particularly elegant. And as Windows evolved and improved from a user experience perspective, the tools developers used to target this environment didn’t improve at the same pace.

Microsoft had other worries at the time. Competitors were bringing more sophisticated software development tools to MS-DOS and Windows, and to competing platforms like CP/M-86, which became DR-DOS, and OS/2, IBM’s take on a post-DOS future. Likewise, the software development landscape was changing, too. Computer scientists had begun talking up a new way of developing software called Object-Oriented Programming, or OOP. And with the rise of GUIs, toolmakers were starting to create application user interface prototyping tools.

As the 1980s were drawing to a close, Microsoft began to explore both of these then-new developer initiatives and the ways in which they could incorporate both into their own developer tools and fight off its increasingly sophisticated competitors. I’ll be discussing OOP and Microsoft’s efforts in that field more broadly in the near future, though they factor in here a bit too. But this story is really about rapid application d...