Visual basic evolved from BASIC(Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). The BASIC language was created by Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of Dartmouth College in the mid 1960s(Deitel&Deitel, 1999) . It is a carefully constructed English-Like language basically used by the programmers to write simple computer programs. It served the purpose of educating laymen like we all the basic concepts of programming. From then on many versions of BASIC were developed to accommodate different computer platforms. Some of the versions are Microsoft QBASIC, QUICKBASIC, GWBASIC ,IBM BASICA, Apple BASIC and etc. Apple BASIC was developed by Steve Wozniak, a former employee of Hewlett-Packard and a good friend of steve Jobs(the founded of Apple Inc.). Steve Jobs had worked with Wozniak in the past (together they designed the arcade game "Breakout" for Atari). They pooled their financial resources together to have PC boards made, and on April 1st, 1976 they officially formed the Apple Computer Company.
The popularity and widespread use of BASIC with different types of computers brought further enhancements of the language, and eventually led to the GUI-based Visual Basic in tandem with the development of Microsoft Windows. Visual Basic made programming even easier for beginners and season programmers alike as it save considerable programming time by providing many ready-made components. Since then, Visual Basic has also evolved into many versions, until recently, Visual Basic 2008. However, Visual Basic 6 remains as one of the most popular version as it is easy to program and it doesn't take up a lot of resources and memory of the computer.
The concept of computer programming
Before we begin programming, let us understand some basic concepts of programming. According to Webopedia, a computer program is an organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to behave in a predetermined manner. Without programs, computers are useless. Therefore, programming means designing or creating a set of instructions to ask the computer to carry out certain jobs which normally are very much faster than human beings can do.
A lot of people think that computer CPU is a very intelligent thing, which in actual fact it is a dumb and inanimate object that can do nothing without human assistant. The microchips of a CPU can only understand two distinct electrical states, namely, the on and off states, or 0 and 1 codes in the binary system. So, the CPU only understands a combinations of 0 and 1 codes, a language which we called machine language. Machine language is extremely difficult to learn and it is not for us laymen to master it easily. Fortunately , we have many smart programmers who wrote interpreters and compilers that can translate human language-like programs such as BASIC into machine language so that the computer can carry out the instructions entered by the users. Machine language is known as the primitive language while Interpreters and compilers like Visual Basic are called high-level language. Some of the high level computer languages beside Visual Basic are Fortran, Cobol, Java, C, C++, Turbo Pascal, and etc .
FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslator and it was developed by IBM Inc. between 1954 and 1957 which was used specifically for scientific ad engineering applications. It is still widely used today in the engineering fields. COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language which was created by a group of computer manufacturers and industrial computer users in 1959. It was designed for commercial applications that required large amount of data processing. It is still being used today in the business fields. C was developed by Dennis Richie at Bell Laboratories in 1972. It is a system implementation language that was used to develop the UNIX operating system. C++ is an extension of C which was created by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1980's. It added the OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) feature to C and now it is the main systems implementation language (Deitel&Deitel, 1999) . PASCAL was created by Professor Nicklaus Wirth for teaching the concepts of structured programming. Its use is primarily confined to the academic world. JAVA is the latest but one of the hottest programming languages developed by the Sun Microsystems in 1995. It was actually an extension of C++ but it has included extensive libraries for doing multimedia, networking, multithreading , graphics, database access, GUI programming. Microsoft also come out with its own version of Javawhich is known as Visual J++. Other programming languages are Power Builder which was developed by Powersoft Corporation and Delphi which was developed by Borland Inc.
