Bill Gates demonstrates Visual Basic (1991)
CrapkaiCited 4× on HN, 2020–2025
demo · general · evergreen · 2020–2025 on HN
A short clip of Bill Gates demonstrating Visual Basic in 1991, showing drag-and-drop building of a Windows GUI.
HN cites it as an example of rapid GUI development that modern tooling hasn't matched, and as precedent for promises of coding without developers.
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4 comments from Hacker News
Pfffft. People have been making solutions for "now we need no more developers" since at least Bill Gates 1991 introduction of Visual Basic. And frankly, Bill Gates showed easily 10x the charisma of Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai combined back then. ▶ this video I mean, I know, we all used Delphi after trying it for a little bit, but still.
VB6 was the only “low code / no code” tool that actually delivered on its promise. Bill Gates demoing it from 32-years ago. ▶ this video
Another is Bill Gates Visual Basic 1.0 demo It was revolutionary. Before that, making a Windows GUI was pretty low level with calls to C APIs and callbacks and registrations. Visual Basic changed all that with point and drag and drop and you could make a GUI in a matter of minutes. ▶ this video
What I find funny is that in the next video recommended to me [0] Gates demonstrates something we used to do daily in the 90s but the indistry still hasn't figured out how to do it properly with web technologies. [0] ▶ this video