Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Many people worked for them to develop products. Employees slept on the floor and worked long hours – pre .COM days. As for who wrote the version of Basic used by Microsoft, I somehow think that employees were hired for that purpose while the two founders ran the company. In truth I do not know if Bill Gates did any of the work on the language originally created by Dartmouth College in 1964, and used by his company. Anything is possible.

Tom





>Is it also true that Mr. Gates was an author of Basic?
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>>I will attempt to tell you what I know about this topic.
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>>There was once a young college student who was attending Harvard University. He had just begun his freshman year in September of 1975, when a few weeks after the semester began a friend of his paid him a visit. His friend told him about a company in Hayward, California who had introduced a microcomputer on what was called the “S-100 Bus. The young college student was Bill Gates and at this news he is said to have exclaimed, “I am too late”!
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>>Mr. Gates quit school and began a company in New Mexico, which made a board for the S-100 Bus computer (I owned one). The board used the CP/M operating system and a version of Basic was in ROM. My then Kansas City Tape Drive was state of the art and took 15 minutes to load a sub set of Basic into my S-100. The new board allowed you to boot up and Basic was available in seconds. Rather cool!
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>>Bill Gates has a special place in his life for Basic and when the first version of Visual Basic was released it was not very useful. A lot of effort and money have gone into improving Visual Basic. Marketing of this product is assured by its association with Bill Gates.
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>>By the way the S-100 had some good programming languages available which I used such as assembler, Fortran, Pascal, and dBaseII. Along came Borland and my $800 Pascal program had competition for about $79 – and it was good. With serious investment of time, money and resources Visual Basic has become a popular programming language. It is little wonder that many of the required DLL’s come with the operating system. It gives VB a “smaller foot print”. VFP has several required files to allow an exe to run. This is not the case with VB – it was designed that way. However do not tell a VB programmer who creates a complex program that integration of the DLL’s into the OS is a trouble free solution.
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>>Tom
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>>>Other than being the work of Microsoft, any other reason why Visual Basic is actually more popular than Visual FoxPro? I mean I don't really understand!
>>>I program in VFP most of the time, in VB rarely, but I do know (and teach!) the language.