Visual Basic on the PC w/Windows 3.1

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If I dig deep into my own heart, really self-reflect, I find I simply don't possess whatever people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do. I think most of us are content to know we've touched a life or two, helped make someone's existence a bit more pleasant, and can feel gratitude toward the universe for those small miracles.<br>Others seem to know no limit in their acquisition of influence, power, and wealth. For them, it isn't simply enough to guide an industry, they must be the industry. In this zero-sum game, there is no upper limit to their cravings<br>Before Musk became the first (I'm choking on the word) trillionaire, Gates was the world's richest person for a couple of decades. Like Musk, he crossed a specific monetary milestone back in 1999 as the "first person with a net worth exceeding $100 billion," about $200B in 2026 money. How he earned it and what he did with it has been the subject of any number of documentaries, books, movies, interviews, depositions, and damning rumors. I think the media can agree on at least one point relevant to our discussion today: Bill Gates was hellbent on owning the entire personal computing landscape.<br>He said as much, out loud, on stage, to industry professionals, in front of the press. Jacqui Morby recounted the story on The Computer Chronicles. "Gary (Kildall) got up (at the Rosen Forum panel discussion) and talked about what his plans were for CP/M and where the company was going, and then made a comment, 'Well, this is a very large market, and there's room for lots of companies.' Bill Gates interrupted and said, 'No, there'll only be one company.'"<br>Let's muse upon the body language of Gates vs. Kildall for a moment. Real shark vs. chum vibes, no?He didn't seem particularly interested in creating innovative things, so much as he wanted to make sure that the innovations of others had a Microsoft response. While working with Apple to develop software for the original Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld recalled a story of Gates digging in for system details that didn't really have anything to do with the business applications being built by Microsoft. Shortly thereafter, Windows 1.0 released, much to Steve Jobs's frustration. Jobs wouldn't be the last to feel screwed over by Microsoft "taking" ideas.<br>Macintosh System 1.0 on the left; Windows 1.0 could only "tile" windows. Windows 2 would gain the overlapping, resizable windows of the Mac, leading Apple CEO John Sculley to file a lawsuit against Microsoft, despite having granted them the right to use the Macintosh's "visual displays" (under threat of Microsoft pulling all Macintosh support)Another tactic employed by Gates was absorption, the tried and true fast-track to acquiring toys one lacks. Consider the story of Alan Cooper. Coincidentally the idea for a visual application builder "popped into his head" just as HyperCard debuted, in 1987, triggered by Microsoft's announced adoption of DLLs, dynamic link libraries, which provided easy access to core operating system functions to whomever wanted to tap into them. Cooper saw this as a unique foundation upon which to build a kind of "construction set" for the DOS visual shell of your corporate dreams. Don't like the default Windows shell? Build your own!<br>Microsoft engineer Gabe Newell was super impressed with Cooper's demo of the construction set, then called Tripod, and arranged for a demonstration for Gates. From the excellent article, "Something Pretty Right" by Ryan Lucas.<br>“It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it,” Cooper remembers of Gates's reaction, “at one point he turned to his retinue and asked ‘Why can't we do stuff like this?'”<br>"Why can't we do stuff like this?" is very revealing phrasing, IMHO as an armchair psychologist. Give that line to 1,000 actors and you'll get 1,000 unique performances balancing the tension between frustration and longing. As a Very Rich Guy™, there was nothing Gates wanted that he couldn't have. Like someone who pays others to level up their RPG character, US$1M and a contract later, Tripod (renamed Ruby) was his.<br>While Cooper insists that HyperCard had no influence on the creation of Tripod, Gates most certainly was thinking about it. In his article "The 25th Birthday of BASIC" for BYTE Magazine, October 1989 (Visual Basic would debut in 1991).<br>HyperCard provides an interesting example of this combination of visual and more standard procedural programming. (HyperTalk) lets you create procedures that relate to the card and the information that the card links with. . . it forms an understandable intermediate step between procedural and object-level programming.<br>- Bill Gates, for BYTE Magazine<br>Ruby was reformulated into something with but a passing resemblance to Tripod. Its bespoke scripting language was replaced with a variant of BASIC, and the goal of the program was no longer to build shells on top of the Microsoft DLLs, but to build applications for Microsoft's own shell,...