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VB on Windows 3.1 was my first intro to programming, thanks for your work! I've always wondered where the "Thunder" prefix for VB's window class names came fro

VB on Windows 3.1 was my first intro to programming, thanks for your work! I've always wondered where the "Thunder" prefix for VB's window class names came from (ThunderForm, ThunderButton, ThunderListBox, etc). Do you know who came up with it and if there's any fun meaning behind the name?

Stratoscope 3y ago
Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on. "Thunder" was the code name that Microsoft adopted for Ruby/VB early on. Its tagline was "The Power to Crack Windows". As you know, window class names existed in a global namespace, so you needed some kind of hopefully-unique prefix or something to avoid collisions. Did you ever happen to see an early VB version with "GSK_" prefixes on window class names and such? My colleague Gary S. Kratkin developed much of the forms editor, so he used his initials as the disambiguator. It was a tradition back then to use your initials like this. Mark Zbikowski may be the most famous example. To this day, every Windows EXE file begins with his initials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable Here is an article from Scott Ferguson about Thunder: https://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html https://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html And a great long-form article from Ryan Lucas of Retool: https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic For the curious, that article has the origin story of "fire an event". I also want to mention Frank Raab and Mark Merker, who both did a ton of work on Ruby, and of course Alan Cooper gets credit for coming up with the idea and developing his Tripod prototype.
- codebolt 3y ago
  > Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on. Oh, then you should know that there are still VB6 apps in heavy use being actively maintained out in the world. I'm working on a treasury management system that is in use by 90+ banks in my country, where the bulk of the app is still VB-based (we're moving to C# but it will be many years still before we can say a complete goodbye to VB).
- byteknight 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing this awesome lore.
- cygnusmove 3y ago
  Very insightful. Thank you for sharing.

Stratoscope 3y ago

Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on. "Thunder" was the code name that Microsoft adopted for Ruby/VB early on. Its tagline was "The Power to Crack Windows". As you know, window class names existed in a global namespace, so you needed some kind of hopefully-unique prefix or something to avoid collisions. Did you ever happen to see an early VB version with "GSK_" prefixes on window class names and such? My colleague Gary S. Kratkin developed much of the forms editor, so he used his initials as the disambiguator. It was a tradition back then to use your initials like this. Mark Zbikowski may be the most famous example. To this day, every Windows EXE file begins with his initials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable Here is an article from Scott Ferguson about Thunder: https://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html https://www.forestmoon.com/birthofvb/birthofvb.html And a great long-form article from Ryan Lucas of Retool: https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic For the curious, that article has the origin story of "fire an event". I also want to mention Frank Raab and Mark Merker, who both did a ton of work on Ruby, and of course Alan Cooper gets credit for coming up with the idea and developing his Tripod prototype.

codebolt 3y ago
> Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on. Oh, then you should know that there are still VB6 apps in heavy use being actively maintained out in the world. I'm working on a treasury management system that is in use by 90+ banks in my country, where the bulk of the app is still VB-based (we're moving to C# but it will be many years still before we can say a complete goodbye to VB).
byteknight 3y ago
Thanks for sharing this awesome lore.
cygnusmove 3y ago
Very insightful. Thank you for sharing.