Comment by vunderba

Comment by vunderba 21 hours ago

4 replies

It's been a long time, but my impression was that QuickBASIC had an interpreter and the ability to compile. Then later on, Microsoft bundled a more limited version called QBasic with later versions of MS DOS which lacked the compiler.

But all of them (QBasic, QuickBASIC, Microsoft PDS, and even Visual Basic for DOS which almost nobody remembers sadly) had the editor, interpretative execution, and built-in help.

agf 18 hours ago

This matches my memory. When I got my dad's old work computer with QuickBASIC on it, and I discovered the compiler, and could write programs other people could "just run", I felt like a real programmer for the first time.

  • 90s_dev 9 hours ago

    Yet you were even before that, the moment you made programs work at all.

90s_dev 21 hours ago

I remember VB-DOS, and fondly too. It was magical. I think I used it even before VB3.

pjmlp 13 hours ago

Yes that was the case, by the time Visual Basic 5 came to be, its compiler was based on Visual C++ backend.