How Alan Cooper Became the Father of Visual Basic

Visual Basic 1.0 shipped in May 1991 and changed who could write Windows software: you drew a form, dropped buttons on it and wrote a few lines of BASIC for each event. The story of how Alan Cooper became the father of Visual Basic goes back to a prototype he built in the late 1980s, a visual shell that Microsoft bought and then married to its QuickBASIC language.

Origins: Tripod, Ruby and Thunder

Around 1987–88, Alan Cooper developed a program called Tripod, a shell that let users build their own Windows front end by dragging controls onto a screen. Its most important idea was a dynamically installable control architecture: new kinds of widgets could be added without changing the core program. Bill Gates saw a demo in 1988 and Microsoft bought the project, which was developed under the codename Ruby.

Microsoft decided not to ship Ruby as a shell. Instead it combined Ruby's form designer with the QuickBASIC language engine under the codename Thunder. The result was announced at Windows World in Atlanta in 1991 as Visual Basic. Microsoft's language team built the BASIC side; Cooper's team supplied the visual engine.

How Alan Cooper became the father of Visual Basic

Cooper did not design the BASIC language inside VB, but the part that made it "visual" was his. Three ideas from Tripod defined the product:

• Drag-and-drop form design: the interface was drawn, not coded.
• Event-driven code: you wrote Command1_Click and VB wired it up.
• Extensible custom controls: the plug-in mechanism became the VBX format, which created an entire third-party component market.

That last point mattered most. VBX controls, later replaced by OCX and ActiveX controls, meant a small company could sell a grid, chart or calendar component to thousands of VB developers. In 1994 Microsoft gave Cooper its Windows Pioneer award for this work, and he went on to become a well-known interaction designer and author of About Face and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

Design and key features

Visual Basic kept BASIC's forgiving syntax but added structured procedures, modules, and later class modules. It used a Variant type that could hold anything, alongside typed variables for those who wanted them. Code was compiled to p-code at first; Visual Basic 5 (1997) added native code compilation. VB was object-based rather than fully object-oriented: you could create classes and use interfaces, but not inherit implementation.

A short Visual Basic example

Private Sub cmdGreet_Click()
    Dim name As String
    name = Trim$(txtName.Text)
    If Len(name) = 0 Then
        MsgBox "Please type your name.", vbExclamation
    Else
        lblResult.Caption = "Hello, " & name & "!"
    End If
End Sub

This event handler runs when the user clicks a button named cmdGreet on a form.

Versions timeline

From VB6 to VB.NET

Visual Basic .NET was a different language wearing familiar syntax, with full object orientation, structured exceptions and the .NET class library. Many VB6 projects could not be migrated automatically, and some developers called it "Visual Fred" in protest. Mainstream support for VB6 ended in 2005 and extended support in 2008, though Microsoft has continued to support the VB6 runtime on Windows, so old applications keep running.

Visual Basic also lives on through VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which arrived in Excel 5 in 1993 and spread through Microsoft Office. VBA macros still automate a vast number of spreadsheets in finance and administration, and VBScript powered classic ASP pages and Windows scripting before Microsoft began phasing it out.

Influence and legacy

VB's rapid application development model shaped Borland Delphi, PowerBuilder, REALbasic (now Xojo) and the form designers of Visual Studio. It brought programming to accountants, scientists and hobbyists who would never have touched C and the Windows API. When people ask how Alan Cooper became the father of Visual Basic, the honest answer is that he invented the visual half, and the visual half is what made millions of people programmers.

Frequently asked questions

Did Alan Cooper write the BASIC language in Visual Basic?

No. The language engine came from Microsoft's QuickBASIC team. Cooper's contribution was the visual form designer and the custom control architecture from his Tripod prototype. Combining the two produced Visual Basic.

Can VB6 programs still run on Windows 11?

In most cases, yes. Microsoft ships and supports the core VB6 runtime files with current Windows versions. Problems usually come from old third-party ActiveX controls or 16-bit components rather than VB6 itself.

Is Visual Basic .NET still developed?

Microsoft still supports VB.NET in .NET and Visual Studio, but announced in 2020 that it would not add major new language features. New work focuses on stability and compatibility. Most new .NET development uses C#.