The BASIC programming language, BASIC supposedly being an acrostic for Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was said to have been first created in the early 60s. But by the mid-1970s, Paul Allen had the idea to team up with Bill Gates and develop a version of this old and simple language for the new micro-computers, particularly the Altair (Altair 8800, very similar to competitor Imsai which had their box featured in the M. Broderick 'accidental nuclear button' movie, War Games). The Radio Shack Tandys would soon also become popular. The new Apple ][+ would become popular (though I always thought Woz or others for Apple wrote their own BASIC interpreter). At any rate, seeing the success, and most know this early history of the PC, IBM decided to jump in as Reagan began his first term. It wasn't just the OS. It was the BASIC. People might still remember the 'green screens', the flat XT boxes, and early programming on the PC. In fact, people probably most remember QuickBASIC. They may have a lot of old programs from the day.

Apple, of course, had decided in the mid-80s to branch out with the Lisa computer, after a visit to XEROX PARC so impressed Steve Jobs. That quickly gave way to the early Macs and a corner on inexpensive desktop publishing. All the local copy shops, by the late 1980s, had to have rental b/w Macs and laserprinters (in 2005, it's mostly PCs, ala Dan Rather's memos). Microsoft wanted in. But their early efforts at a windowing OS were somewhat flat. But, not ironically, it was by building a version 3.1 with new TrueType technology and a display of anti-aliased text on screen, that drag-drop, objects, and visual became new buzzwords. Win 3.1 was the OS breakthrough for Microsoft. And Apple, which had helped in the project, just as IBM had helped MS with its competing OS, never mind ponying up the original PC platform, came out the worse for it. And Visual BASIC was the rework for Windows of the venerable DOS QuickBASIC. They existed side by side for a long time.

Microsoft execs decided in about 2001-2002, perhaps, to pursue a very new strategy. And that became .NET. There is a continuation of BASIC, sort of, with .NET. Support for what is now called, classic Visual BASIC, generally versions 3-6, but mostly versions 5 and 6, is said to be incoporated into the next version of the OS, until the end of the decade. Yet Microsoft claims it will not really support this old Visual BASIC, preferring the somewhat more secure .NET framework.

It's difficult to know if one should side exclusively with the enemy one knows. VB, now 'classic VB', had a lot of limitations. It put forth security flaws, and was not principally built with the idea of malicious hackers getting into virtual machines, and the like. It was 'improved' to incorporate class callouts, properties and methods now, and such. The syntax was not so different from Java, or even in some cases, C (except without all the low level buffer and type management). That is, in other words, it looks like a lot of languages, as what a computer language is and how it might be designed, has become more and more settled.

Of course, to force a product on the assumption that all information is being kept, traded and considered over wire or wireless, seems a bit naive. If it can work just fine locally, no matter, even if it means turning every client into a server? But most of the work is done on a 'client'. The trading is not constant. Results tend to be published, not the hours of working on various apps - not necessarily at least. QuickBASIC survived hidden away in DOS as DOS was hidden more and more, even as Visual BASIC was developed over many years. Perhaps moreso, the COM-based Visual BASIC has certain advantages over a .NET framework, and might better be left to co-exist on the odd, strange, off-world presumption that the product ought to cater to the customer, rather than the customer being expected to cater to a particular vendor's management?

If .NET, however, does prove to have the same functionality, locally, and over wire, then it's just a new platform, design and syntax. This kind of thing always changes. This isn't medicine, or even astrophysics. Programming tools and designs can change seemingly every couple of months. It's unsettling. A lot of 'science' seems to get discarded, as it were. And bad code becomes the rule. But it's a fact. The manipulation of XML by XSLT is relatively new, or at least didn't catch on until a couple of years ago. And XSLT is a declarative language, and rather clumsy and verbose at that without some intermediate alias pre-processor. Yet many people were quick to it, or for other purposes to a similar language in Python.

On the other hand, if you have a complete 'classic' app that works, and worked with few changes upgrading to the latest Microsoft OS, it would indeed be startling to find that the next OS simply won't run the program. Microsoft made its way with Windows, and with DOS before it, by maintaining backward compatibility. In the 21st century, that tried and tested Microsoft strategy seems to have been - deprecated. Time will tell.