storm: visual language...

Visual Basic (VB) has come a long way since my schooling years... I use to program using BASIC then. The history of BASIC dates back to the 60s and became very popular in the 80s (yes, I was around then... super cool with computers) I did not have a micro-computer at home but spent most of the time at the school computer lab.

BASIC actually stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC is designed as a time-sharing programming language. That means multi-user capabilities.

In 1975, Microsoft (Bill Gates and Paul Allen) released Altair BASIC. They versioned this under other platforms and made millions of copies. Many newer BASIC versions were created during this period. Microsoft sold several versions of BASIC for MS-DOS/PC-DOS including BASICA, GW-BASIC (a BASICA-compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM) and Quick BASIC. Various extensions of home computer BASIC appeared, typically with graphics, sound and DOS commands, as well as facilities for structured programming.

However, by the latter half of the 1980s newer computers were far more complex and included features (such as graphical user interfaces—GUIs) that made BASIC less suitable for programming. At the same time, computers had progressed from a hobbyist interest to tools used primarily for applications written by others, and programming as a whole became less important for the growing majority of users. BASIC started to fade, though numerous versions remained available.

I stopped playing around computers this time... no idea why. Temporary lost interest for a few years... maybe I got bored... but mainly because the computer lab in my school closed and we could not afford computers then... it was like an expensive hobby. What a waste...

In University my interests grew again because suddenly all the faculty labs had computers and my friends got new and powerful ones. BASIC's fortune reversed once again with the introduction of Visual Basic from Microsoft. Though it is somewhat difficult to consider this language to be BASIC (despite its many familiar BASIC keywords) by the time of writing it had become one of the most-used languages on the Windows platform. It is said to represent some 70 to 80% of all commercial development. Microsoft created a variant called WordBasic and used it in versions of MS Word before Word 97. Microsoft added Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to Excel 5.0 in 1993, to Access 95 in 1995, and to the rest of its Office suite in 1997. Internet Explorer 3.0 and later and Microsoft Outlook included a VBScript interpreter. The most recent version of Visual Basic is called VB.NET.

For those who played around with BASIC before... this is nostalgic:

10 INPUT "What is your name: "; U$
20 PRINT "Hello "; U$
25 REM
30 INPUT "How many stars do you want: "; N
35 S$ = ""
40 FOR I = 1 TO N
50 S$ = S$ + "*"
55 NEXT I
60 PRINT S$
65 REM
70 INPUT "Do you want more stars? "; A$
80 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN GOTO 70
90 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
100 IF (A$ = "Y") OR (A$ = "y") THEN GOTO 30
110 PRINT "Goodbye ";
120 FOR I = 1 TO 200
130 PRINT U$; " ";
140 NEXT I
150 PRINT

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