July 1, 2026
Windows of Wrath
Visual Basic on the PC with Windows 3.1
The retro coding comeback sparked nostalgia, Gates rage, and one savage roast
TLDR: The article says Visual Basic helped Microsoft tighten its grip on personal computing by making app creation far easier on Windows 3.1. In the comments, readers split between furious Gates-bashing, warm nostalgia for a game-changing tool, and jokes that the supposedly dead software is still haunting Excel.
This story starts as a history lesson and quickly turns into a full-on comment section food fight. The article argues that Microsoft, under Bill Gates, didn’t just want to compete in personal computing in the early 1990s — it wanted to own the whole thing, with Visual Basic on Windows 3.1 becoming part of that empire-building push. For non-geeks: Visual Basic was a much easier way to make Windows programs by clicking and dragging instead of typing everything from scratch, and for many people it felt revolutionary.
But the readers? Oh, they were not just here for the software nostalgia. One of the loudest reactions was pure anti-billionaire venom, with Gates and Elon Musk getting dragged as symbols of endless greed. Another commenter dropped a dark, brutally short joke — "Apartheid child slaves?" — instantly setting the tone for the thread: less "fond memories," more "eat the rich." Others took a different route and got sentimental, with one veteran saying Visual Basic in 1991 felt like a "huge leap for mankind" compared to what came before. That gave the discussion a fun split-screen effect: half corporate villain origin story, half misty-eyed retro love letter.
And then came the side-quest chaos. One person claimed AdGuard DNS flagged the site as suspicious, which added a random little "is the article itself cursed?" twist. Another insisted Visual Basic isn’t really dead because it still lives inside Excel, like some immortal office goblin waiting behind Alt+F11. In other words: the article was about old software, but the comments turned it into a referendum on Gates, greed, nostalgia, and whether dead tools ever truly die
Key Points
- •The article presents Bill Gates as pursuing dominance over the personal computing market rather than coexistence with multiple major competitors.
- •A cited anecdote from Jacqui Morby describes Gates interrupting Gary Kildall at a Rosen Forum panel to say there would be only one company.
- •The article references Gates’s long tenure as the world’s richest person and his 1999 milestone of exceeding $100 billion in net worth.
- •Andy Hertzfeld is cited recalling Gates seeking Macintosh system details while Microsoft was developing software for Apple.
- •The article links that behavior to the later release of Windows 1.0 and notes Steve Jobs’s frustration with Microsoft.