Windows and Visual Basic happened for me at the same time. My parents got a new computer with this Windows operating system on it. I’d never seen a graphical user interface before, so it blew my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything, so a week later I bought Visual Basic 1.0 at Babbage’s in the Columbus mall with my money I earned picking up turf scraps.

Hello World in Visual Basic 1.0 in German

The language was kind of like the BASIC I knew and loved, but I could draw forms and add buttons and attach behavior to them! The idea of a programming language having a visual component was beyond amazing to my young mind. I don’t remember if Visual Basic 1.0 had a database or not, but I know it either did or they later added the ability to open Microsoft Access databases inside VB.

With graphical forms, behavior on interaction, and databases, this programming was very much like what I do with JavaScript and Ruby or Python today.

I still remember my first project I wrote. It was an alarm clock. You could enter a time and when that time came – if the program was running and in the foreground – it would play a WAV file of your choosing on a loop. A couple of years later, I wanted to learn to play the guitar around this time and managed to get my hands on an electric guitar plus an amp. I hooked the amp up to my sound card and used it to wake everyone up with booming cow noises.