“The final product horrified Cooper, who loathed BASIC,” Lucas writes. Instead, the project which was then codenamed Thunder, became a Business Language project and was shipped in 1991 as a version of BASIC. This did not happen though, for reasons that are not clear but might include politics over OS/2, which was supposedly going to replace Windows, or conflict with the team building Windows itself. The project was shown to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who agreed to bundle it with the upcoming Windows 3.0. The prototype was called Tripod, and allowed drag and drop of objects like buttons and listboxes onto a design surface.Īccording to the post by Lucas, the naming of these design objects changed over time, from “waldos” to “gizmos” to “controls.” This was in 1987, when Windows was winning users but writing applications for the operating system was hard.

Developer Alan Cooper first conceived Microsoft’s Visual Basic (VB) as a “shell construction kit,” according to a new history written by Retool head of design Ryan Lucas.

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