Ooh, nice to see my project here. I was the lead developer of Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "visual" side of Visual Basic.
Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.
Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.
I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them.
Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.
Microsoft decided to make Basic the scripting language and sell it as a standalone development system instead of being the Windows shell.
I guess my great claim to fame is the VBX (Visual Basic eXtension) interface, which I originally called the Gizmo API. I still think "gizmo" was a much better name than "control" as Microsoft later called them.
AMA.