Comment by Stratoscope

2 days ago

HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic.

I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic.

Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod.

Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles.

I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.

1 comment

Stratoscope

canucker2016 1 day ago

A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history - https://retool.com/visual-basic

  Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration:

  In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell.

Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.