Introducing Visual Basic

A Story About Bill and Paul

Back in the early 1970’s, Bill and Paul were friends at Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. Bill and Paul enjoyed working with computers and wrote many games they could play - games like Tic-Tac-Toe and moon landing games. These computer games were written in a computer language called BASIC (which stands for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). When the first small computer was developed in the mid 1970’s, Bill and Paul had just started college. They had improved their computer skills by then and were able to tell that new computer how to use the BASIC language. They actually sold their version of the BASIC language to other people (it cost $350 and was stored on a cassette tape). They started making money selling BASIC and decided to start a company. You may have heard of their company - Microsoft! Bill is Bill Gates, who still runs Microsoft and is worth many billions of dollars, and Paul is Paul Allen, who no longer works for Microsoft, but has his own business ventures including computers and software, professional sports teams, and real estate development.

Yes, the first product sold by Microsoft was the BASIC computer language. Microsoft’s name for their BASIC language product has changed over the years, having names like GW-BASIC, QuickBasic and QBasic, with the newest version being called Visual Basic. Visual Basic is one of the easiest programming languages to learn. Yet, even though it is easy to learn and to use, Visual Basic can also be used to develop very powerful computer programs. Many computer games are written in Visual Basic, businesses use Visual Basic to manage their databases, webmasters use Visual Basic in developing web pages, and people like yourself use Visual Basic to build Windows applications they want and need in their everyday life. In these notes, you will learn how to use Microsoft’s Visual Basic to write your own computer programs. You may not become a billionaire like Bill and Paul, but hopefully you’ll have some fun learning a very valuable skill.