A brief look at Visual Basic for DOS

[@MrMaxeemum]

I never realised there was a Visual Basic for dos. I started with Qbasic and wrote some complicated programs for interfacing with industrial equipment, extremely niche. It did the job and helped me progress in my profession. Those Dos screens brought back some great memories.

[@ReEnthused]

It does have a certain look to it :)

[@PeterSwinkels]

Really? What kind of equipment? What kind of connections? COM ports?

[@MrMaxeemum]

@@PeterSwinkels Electrical test equipment for testing bare board PCBs and CNC drilling / routing machines all done through Parallel and Serial ports.

[@PeterSwinkels]

@@MrMaxeemum : ah, thanks for the quick reply. Did you use the OPEN statement to access those ports?

[@Tigrou7777]

If you could easily bind the forms to a database this would have been a killer app, especially for stores checkout / inventory in the early 90's (DOS run on pretty much anything).

[@Comeyd]

@@Tigrou7777 if you could interface with it you probably could. The bigger issue with it is that DOS doesn’t have a network stack. No real or easy way to do so easily (could use a modem, but at that point, may as well just use the DOS machine as a dumb terminal)

[@squirlmy]

@@Comeyd you remind me of learning Novell Networking back in early '95. They had just bought DR-DOS(or was it another DOS clone???) and Windows 95 would be very, very late. There was also Banyon Vines networking. They were "Network Operating Systems" onto themselves, and yeah, basically DOS was used as a dumb terminal for the NOS. I'm not sure what a network stack for CP/M would look like, but, anyways, if the market wasn't so lazy and it so difficult to make changes in business, we could have easily just adopted something else (OS/2 also comes to mind). The fact is that Microsoft had a monopoly and they promised to provide networking with Windows and that was just the path of least resistance for PC owners.

[@ian_b]

I bought a copy of this, it ran well on my 286 (PS/2 Model 60). It was pretty cool to be able to write a compiled BASIC program with a mouse interface. I actually liked the DOS era "GUI" a lot.

[@ReEnthused]

Agreed, there was a pleasant simplicity to it

[@LM555chip]

wow, this is so cool. this gives me one more reason to use DOS for my hobby coding device. thanks a lot for the demo.

[@ReEnthused]

Glad you enjoyed it Paul

[@HighwinderShow]

I absolutely LOVED VBDOS and wrote some cool stuff with it back in the day after first learning the ropes with Microsoft PDS. I had both standard and pro versions (still do actually).

[@okona1up]

VB Dos is an interesting tidbit of computer history...

[@ReEnthused]

It is, a nice quirky bit of software

[@okona1up]

@@ReEnthused Somehow I like those Text User Interfaces.

[@ThecrackpotdadPlus]

I remember having to evaluate VB for Dos vs Clipper for the company I worked for. We ended up going with clipper in the end.

[@Blazs120gl]

I remember writing text-mode user interfaces in Turbo Pascal, Clipper and C back in the days. :D One had to use the ASCII table for the block characters and the dithered background characters, while scanning for the cursor keys for navigating in menus and updating the highlighted menu item with a different color. Also the mouse had to be handled via IRQ services, the hardware cursor's height had to be set to zero, otherwise it was shown wherever the last print operation was...One had to put a lot of inline assember into it to make it nice. I've never seen this DOS Visual Basic before, but it sure made life a lot easier. :D

[@ReEnthused]

Hah, yes it sounds like it would have :)

[@BryanChance]

The text UI is amazing. It's totally functional and looks good too.

[@ReEnthused]

It is a genuinely good environment

[@wysoft]

I remember back in the day using several DOS based programs that were written in VB. The first time I ever saw that in the "About" screen of a TUI DOS program I was blown away. Didn't even know it existed at the time, and I was well into doing VB4 programming in Windows for several years.

[@camptube7621]

I learned VB on this version. Then went onto VB for windows. Great language and very powerful.

[@MULAMIGZ]

Great vid 🔥🔥

[@logansorenssen]

Another cool thing about VBDos is that it can build and run most QBasic/QuickBasic programs too. It was pretty handy if you tinkered in Qbasic and wanted to build EXEs out of your QBasic projects.

[@ReEnthused]

Ah yes - I forgot to mention that, cheers.

[@Kawa-oneechan]

Grayed checkboxes aren't locked. They're an indeterminate third state. For example, with a selection of files the "read-only" checkbox may be gray if some of those files are read-only but not all of them are. If you then click it, the checkbox will toggle between on and off as usual. Some applications might go on-off-gray if it started gray, to indicate "on second thought let's not change the read-only on these files".

[@ReEnthused]

Yep it has, of course, a separate enabled flag.

[@tmilker]

This is really cool! I wish I knew about it when I was a kid. To me back then, as a teenager, it was dismissed in favor of C because of its ancestor BASIC but the more I learn about it as a more experienced programmer the more I think it would have been infinitely more productive for me getting started as a programmer.

[@ReEnthused]

It is surprisingly effective as a software creation tool in DOS

[@leadedsolder]

A lot of the most productive people I’ve met got started with VB. Less stuff in the way meant they had fewer reasons to get frustrated and give up 😅

[@squirlmy]

@@leadedsolder yes, but I bet it was on Windows and not DOS. It came out just as Microsoft was gearing up to push Windows and deprecate DOS as much as possible. Also I shudder to think what virus writers at the time would do with VB for DOS, if it was more popular and accessible.

[@tommyovesen]

Great video. I never used VB for DOS. I used Turbo Pascal, but I used VB for Windows up until Visual Studio and .NET 1.0 came

[@ReEnthused]

We used it from VB3, but continued up to .net too after we tried C++ in Visual Studio and decided it wasn't worth it

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

142K! Blimey! But it's interesting seeing how quickly it builds up. I just typed in a 4K program that works well :) Good fun Mr B! Torus Goes DOSsing!

[@DrDavesDiversions]

As a point of comparison, for #DOScember, I'm revisiting the first DOS program I ever wrote (1988), an x86 assembler graphical drawing program. The .EXE is only ever so slightly larger than the .ASM source file. :)

[@ReEnthused]

Thanks matey. Yeah it has overheads, but surprisingly small given those overheads.

[@ReEnthused]

Hah, yep - not quite so impressive size-wise compared to asm :)

[@DrDavesDiversions]

@@ReEnthused I'll choose libraries full of functionality over tiny, custom UIs any day. (And the rest of the world seems to agree. ;) )

[@DosGamerMan]

I was writing my own text menu system in Borland C in the 90s.

[@mkennedy150]

Can also just use config.sys and autoexec.bat to make a text menu.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I did'nt know they had made vb for dos. Its quiet fun, I wonder how many dos installers where written in it.

[@ReEnthused]

I wonder how many programs were written in it full stop, it came out at a weird time - but it's still quite powerful

[@MrWaalkman]

I probably still have a copy of it around here somewhere... :)

[@mzsharpworks]

I had no idea Visual BASIC existed for DOS ! I was busy using GWBASIC and then QuickBASIC around this time (with a compiler too).

[@ReEnthused]

I guess this is technically the next step after QuickBASIC Pro, technically.

[@ZombieRyushu]

Have you ever heard of an application called DEC DART All-in-1 For DOS?

[@ReEnthused]

I haven't, no. Can you tell me more about it? A quick search just bought up the DART VM or, well, Darts the game

[@ZombieRyushu]

@@ReEnthused It's a client from Digital Equipment Corporationfor MS-DOS Intended to connect to a VAX, and came with a Word Processor called WPS Plus. I have Disks 2, 3 and 4, but am missing disk 1

[@WillianSilvaNet]

Amazing tool, I had play with it a many years ago. But I lost the installer! Do you know where I can download it again and play with it? I remember it has a database API.

[@ReEnthused]

I believe I got it from WinWorldPC.com in the end

[@Keduce22]

Im curious if you could create an application with VB for Windows and export it to DOS ... i.e. be able to target both platforms easily. If both are cross compatible.

[@ReEnthused]

Unfortunately not, I tried opening up a project created in VB1 for Windows in DOS and vice versa, neither worked

[@Keduce22]

@@ReEnthused Ah thats very unfortunate ... would have been a valuable feature back in the day ... and even now I guess 🤔if you wanted to create quick, useful utilities for MS DOS and older versions of Windows

[@paulscarlett4346]

I did work with VBDos and VB for Windows building a serial communication program.. in multiple languages... was very tricky not to add a feature that could not be done in the other.. sometimes i was limited by DOS and times it was Windows. interesting you could build DOS programs with out the windowing system.. was fun times

[@fra4455]

Great video✌

[@ReEnthused]

Thanks

[@fra4455]

@@ReEnthused thanks too

[@ncot_tech]

CONST TRUE = NOT FALSE 😁 Is this like Turbo Pascal where you can run code that hasn’t been saved yet, so if your machine crashes you lose any code that wasn’t saved?

[@ReEnthused]

No it forces you to save, talk about taking out the danger

[@kyleolson8977]

VB DOS feels like an odd thing. Microsoft had more serious BASIC tools which are mostly forgotten now. There's QuickBASIC (not the free add-on QBASIC), which is a compiler for the .BAS files, and there was the more serious BASIC PDS. When the first Visual Basic came out, MS stopped making new DOS tools except this one Visual Basic DOS. BASIC PDS had professional level dev tools for BASIC and for integrating with other languages, and it had libraries for making GUIs like the ones seen here, but it did not have a UI for this. I have to imagine the market for a Pro-level BASIC tool completely disappeared in 1991 except with hobbyists like me, and I was already looking to move onto C++.

[@ReEnthused]

It is an oddity, but one that plainly had a lot of time, energy and love poured into it

[@squirlmy]

Microsoft had also created Basic for most of the 8-bit computers that came out before the PC. Like Applesoft Basic is a dialect of Microsoft Basic, and the Altair Basic was Microsoft's first. Microsoft marketing really pushed Windows and VB for Windows (and for Office), it wasn't just market forces, it was a deliberate tack by Microsoft.

[@sevzas]

Vb for dos looks a bit like foxpro

[@ReEnthused]

It does, yes

[@typedef_]

Lots of similarities are found in Visual Studio

[@zzco]

Kind of wish somebody would reverse-engineer VBDOS and implement it cleanly, lol

[@ReEnthused]

A nice simple IDE that could make retro-ui apps for DOS and, maybe, Linux would be kind of cool

[@zzco]

Indeed. Or a C programming library (for e.g. watcom C) that does for DOS what winapi does for Windows 3.x, lol.

[@jerzyglowacki]

@@ReEnthused There are: Turbo Vision and its fork TVision.

[@Pracedru]

Run it in Windows 10!!

[@ReEnthused]

Ah, you want hard mode? I'll give it a try and report back :)