My dad actually worked at a startup (two programmers if I recall) in 1990 onward that wrote very similar software to MS Visual Basic and even has a BASIC derive

My dad actually worked at a startup (two programmers if I recall) in 1990 onward that wrote very similar software to MS Visual Basic and even has a BASIC derived language. It was called Realizer. They started working on this before MS announced VB, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was already similar software around. If I recall correctly, my dad was at a trade show and their booth was right next to Microsoft (whom he turned down an offer from the year prior to work at this startup instead). Needless to say, we're watching the video of a VB demo, not a Realizer one :) I can't find much online about the original Realizer, but there is a Wikipedia article for CA-Realizer, which was the version released after CA bought their company. CA-Realizer didn't really go anywhere and my dad eventually left CA as well. Very cool story though, and a large reason I chose to work at small companies fresh out of college too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Realizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Realizer