The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
SMRTR summary
In 1988, Alan Cooper showcased "Tripod," a shell construction kit for Windows, to Microsoft's Bill Gates. Gates acquired the project, which became Visual Basic - a visual programming environment that thrived for a decade. Visual Basic offered an accessible transition for mainframe programmers to Windows development and attracted new programmers with its intuitive interface and extensible control system. However, Microsoft's radical changes to Visual Basic with the .NET framework in 2002 led to its decline due to increased complexity and lack of backwards compatibility.
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