Yeah, actually Microsoft used P-Code way before VB1 - AFAIK their C compiler was able to emit it and several of their products were compiled as P-Code instead o

Yeah, actually Microsoft used P-Code way before VB1 - AFAIK their C compiler was able to emit it and several of their products were compiled as P-Code instead of machine code, which helped to save disk space (a premium at the time, especially considering it could make a difference on how many floppy disks they shipped) and quickly port their applications to other emerging platforms at the time (like the Macintosh). Both Microsoft's P-Code and Java were really inspired by UCSD Pascal which only emitted P-Code to be executed by a runtime they implemented quickly in a lot of systems (including the original IBM PC).