Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1(stonetools.ghost.io)
36 pointsby TMWNN4 days ago6 comments
  • delichon21 hours ago
    I'm so old ... I got a coding job in 1991. The boss asked if I had any experience in Visual Basic. I said no, but it just came out last week. It's hard to describe what a huge leap for mankind that was compared to QuickBasic.
    • vunderba21 hours ago
      It really was an incredible tool especially for RAD. One of my first "professional" gigs was in highschool porting an old CAD program written for VB-DOS over to VB 3.0. Sure as hell beat the landscaping work I did over the previous summer.
      • nashadelic21 hours ago
        Wow “RAD” is such a throw back. Everything is now RAD with AI, we need to bring back the term.
  • WillAdams21 hours ago
    Funny, you'd think the idea of a graphical version of BASIC would have come to mind when he bought MacBasic for $1:

    https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

    For my part, I've decided that my next project will probably be done in PureBasic/SpiderBasic, and that if I then feel the need for pure opensource goodness I'll port it Gambas.

    That said, if one wants HyperCard on the Mac (or Windows) there's still LiveCode (though it gave up on opensource).

  • pan6916 hours ago
    Does anyone remember ToolBook? I spend a couple of years from the mid to late 90s working with this daily, crossing from Windows 3.11 into Windows 95/98. It's a bit Visual Basic-esque, as a matter of fact, Paul Allen was a founder of the company that produced it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToolBook

    • WillAdams12 hours ago
      Yes, used it quite a bit, and even bought the Heizer Software conversion tool to make my HyperCard Stacks run on it --- insofar as anything ran in it, performance was rather lacking, unless one had a cutting edge machine.

      I guess everyone moved on from it to Runtime Revolution (which became LiveCode).

  • nubinetwork21 hours ago
    > AdGuard DNS blocked access to stonetools.ghost.io because it’s in our database of phishing and malicious domains
    • ChristopherDrum21 hours ago
      Author here. Let me first note that the site is 100% free, and requires no account to read anything. I only use the built-in Ghost blogging subscription for those who want it delivered to their email, but it is absolutely not necessary. That's the full and total extent of anything email related with the site. I have many readers who subscribe to the RSS feed, which is free and open and requires no email whatsoever.

      I have been trying to get this unblocked for some time now. I've tried reporting it as a false positive, and so did the Ghost admins, through the Google safebrowsing report mechanism. I saw my blog listed on phishtank.net, but that site isn't accepting new accounts and I have to have an account to report a false positive.

      Ghost admins recommended I use a custom subdomain, and it may come to that. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is very frustrating.

      • mrandish3 hours ago
        FYI, I've visited and enjoyed your site previously and can't connect now. It's not due to ublock. Neither Firefox nor Edge can access it due to:

            Secure Connection Failed

    An error occurred during a connection to stonetools.ghost.io. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. 

    Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
      • don-bright20 hours ago
        i just took that pesky 's' out of https and it let me click thru.
        • ChristopherDrum20 hours ago
          Thank you, that's great to know! (I also found the method for reporting false positives to AdGuard, and hopefully that will get cleared up on their end one day.)
    • nacs21 hours ago
      UBlock Origin is also giving me the warning on that domain.
  • don-bright20 hours ago
    It's not dead. It's included with every copy of Desktop Excel and probably will be for 20 years. Press Alt-F11 and away you go (enable Developer tab first i guess?). Forms, SQL connectors, collections, alot of other stuff even XML parsing is in there somewhere if you dig around enough.

    I mean it's like. not being developed anymore and not added to, and its a pain to have it deal with modern stuff like https but. yeah. its only mostly dead.

    • ChristopherDrum19 hours ago
      That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.
      • vic20forever19 hours ago
        You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).
        • pjmlp9 hours ago
          There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.

          VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.

          The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.

          You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.

    • WillAdams19 hours ago
      For a bit of the background on that development see:

      https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

  • functionmouse3 days ago
    > If I dig deep into my own heart, really self-reflect, I find I simply don't possess whatever people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do.

    Apartheid child slaves?

    • NetMageSCW18 hours ago
      For you, an inability to contribute anything worthwhile to society?
    • ChristopherDrum3 days ago
      Something like that, yeah.
    • pryce21 hours ago
      An affable personal relationship with Jeffery Epstein?
      • ChristopherDrum20 hours ago
        Also like that, yes. (I did include an Epstein-related link in the post)