What Happened?

[Tim]

I am a (senior citizen) recent discoverer of QB64 and am agape at the recent events.  I am impressed with the community and will be lurking around to participate and help.  There is a lot I will never know, but it would be good to have a history of QB64 somewhere (probably there already is) starting with "Galleon"?  And I suppose a LARGE number of supporters.  [Well, there is the Wikipedia article]

Question: I have links to three Wiki's: 1) https://qb64.dijkens.com/wiki/Main_Page.html 2) https://qb64phoenix.com/wiki/www.qb64.or..._Page.html 3) https://qb64phoenix.com/qb64wiki/index.php/Main_Page. Which is "most current" or "will be maintained"?

Also, say something about the different use of the "discord" forum vs. this forum.

Thanks, Dave

I too would be interested in knowing more about the history of QB64, and definitely starting with Galleon--like, where is he now or what happened to him. I am sure that a lot of people know these things, but many--like me--have no idea.

Tim

[admin]

I'd love to sit down and write all the new users up a nice long history lesson on the language and the people who've helped develop it, but right now I'm a wee bit busy migrating wiki pages and sorting out all the little settings and tweaks to make using the forums here as enjoyable and hassle free as possible.

I'll put it on my "To Do" list, but don't expect to see anything done on it, at all, for probably at least a month or more, at the earliest.

[Tim]

I'd love to sit down and write all the new users up a nice long history lesson on the language and the people who've helped develop it, but right now I'm a wee bit busy migrating wiki pages and sorting out all the little settings and tweaks to make using the forums here as enjoyable and hassle free as possible.

I'll put it on my "To Do" list, but don't expect to see anything done on it, at all, for probably at least a month or more, at the earliest. 

I understand. And I am very grateful for what you have done and for what you are doing.

[micronoise]

I'm glad I joined the discord a few weeks ago (and the old forum a few days later), or I would still be pulling out my hair in frustration not knowing what the hell had happened when everything went down ? Keep up the good work, and don't let any single person have the power to just nuke everything.

[Pete]

@dcromley and @Tim

QB64 started out in 2007. A then young programmer had the neat idea to extend the life of QuickBASIC.At the time, the fiendly folks at MicroThoughts ditched support for the wonderful little 16-bit app. So Rob, aka Galleon Dragon, wanted to make a QB to C translator project to get QB back on 32-bit platforms. Since C/C++ was a stable language and slated for use in the foreseeable future, he knew if he could get QB statements to work as C/C++ statements, he could accomplish his goal. That was an ambitious project, and there was already a start up called FreeBasic in the works, at the time. There were also a handful of other skilled programmers who had similar ambitions and projects. DOSBox comes to mind.

So why didn't everyone just use DOSBox? Well, it was emulated and clumsy. You couldn't run an exe on it, and you had to mount Qbasic in Dos box and run it interpreted. Well how about FreeBasic? Well at the time, the largest QB forum community was the old Network54 QBasic Forum. Several members did migrate from it to FB, which promised to be 100% QB compatible [cough] excuse me. I think folks like me are equipped with built in BS radar devices, but a bunch of QB coders did leave the QBasic Forum and started learning FB. Personally I thought FB was just stringing folks along, until they could get them on their short bus to C, which is more what the language turned out looking like, back then. So along comes Rob to the QBasic Forum to discuss his plans. I had a good feeling about him, but I had to work my ASCII off to get the boss, Mac to make a sub-forum for the project. You see we had a few talented young college students who were trying to make compilers of their own. I don't think they really realized the time they didn't have to complete the task. Rob (Galleon) seemed more realistic. He turned out to be that 1 in a million who made good. Anyway, we started up the sub-forum, and he made some very impressive progress. The first few versions were slow as a snail, but if anyone remembers those initial internet vids, back in the 1990s, well, enough said. Eventually speed and performance picked up, and unlike FB, QB64 was nearly 100% QB compatible; and Rob wanted to keep it that way!

Well in 2008, Mac, The QBasic Forum owner, became terminally ill and passed away. He handed the forum over to me to keep his QBasic Forever" mantra alive. That was all working fine, until a couple of years later. Some nutcase hacked N54 and brought the forum down. Fortunately we were able to get a backup online in a few days, and without much loss. We had great folks at that N54 hosting site. Well during that downtime, Rob up and started his own site, QB64 dot net. (Don't try and go there now, I'll explain later). I was fine with the move, as the project clearly appeared to be the future of QB prgramming. I even became a mod there. As for The QBasic Forum, it kept on chugging along, until Network54 decided to hang up the business a few years back, and sell its boards to Tapatalk. I liked the Tapatalk folks I was working with, so I migrated the forum. It was one of their largest migration projects. They did very well, we only lost a few pages in the process, but now back to the QB64 dot net story. Well it started going down quite often. Growing pains I guess. So three members started up the QB64 dot org site, Bill, Luke, and Fell. Originally they planned to only have the site up when dot net was down, but after that happened about 5 or so times, I was able to convince them to keep it up permanently. They did, and good thing, as a couple months later the dot net site went down for good. Eventually some non-programmer got a hold of it, and put up a handful of pages. Rob looked into it and warned everyone not to go there anymore, as he thought whomever got a hold of it was using it to collect user information when you signed back in to your account. So long story longer, all the posts at QB64 dot net, code, etc, were lost for good.

In January of this year, I guess Fell got over burdened and let someone from Discord (Not really a forum, more of an online chat room) take control of the whole QB64 project. The spiel from this Royal Clown Cola guy was something along the lines of making this nice little hobby language into some bigger than life deal. Remember that BS radar I referenced earlier? Well, it goes off again. So I go back to the .org site and the first thing I see is an "Accept Agreement" page. It's a bit over-controlling, so I close the window instead of accepting the terms. A day later, sure enough, wham, the whole Qb64 dot org forum, including the YouTube channel and Wiki go offline. It's been what, four days now? I'm glad Steve jumped straight in and created this site. We simply have no idea if the .org forum will ever come back, and if any of our work  will still be available if it does. I do know, from communicating with Fell, briefly, he's not coming back.

So that's the past history. The present history is to get content up at this site, so search engines can get newbies here to experience the greatest hobby language ever made, and enjoy the support they need to get up and running. The future? Well like Mac said, "QBasic Forever."

Well that was fun, but it took me a lot longer to write this little slice of history than it did to create the accompanying hit single. It went tin on the Billboard Top Ten-Zillion Chart, just today!

https://staging.qb64phoenix.com/showthre...php?tid=40

Pete

[johnno56]

Thanks Pete. Good to know. I had been at QB64.rip for some years and I miss the discussions, debates, the help and the humour... *sniff* (oh... the people too... lol)

[dcromley]

@Pete, Thanks SO MUCH.  I am impressed.  The best to you all (including me).

[Pete]

@Pete, Thanks SO MUCH.  I am impressed.  The best to you all (including me).

That grin really does make my ears look big.

Pete

[vince]

Several members did migrate from it to FB, which promised to be 100% QB compatible [cough] excuse me. I think folks like me are equipped with built in BS radar devices, but a bunch of QB coders did leave the QBasic Forum and started learning FB. Personally I thought FB was just stringing folks along, until they could get them on their short bus to C, which is more what the language turned out looking like, back then. 

Way to belittle freebasic, it was light years ahead of current QB64 before QB64 (or even QB32) even existed.  The heavyweights realized modern coding practices were far too convenient to pass up but, it's fair to say, ended up losing sight what QB really was.  QB64 is totally doing the same thing with all the new little modern tricks that get bled into the language. Thankfully, the N54 retirement home crowd keeps it rooted -- can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Anyways, good summary.  It's worth noting that QB64 IS QB in spirit.  It's an emulator, or a tool, to bypass the fact that x86_64 mode no longer supports the "Virtual8086" mode in 32-bit that allowed QB to run on Windows natively.  The heart of it all is still QB, just a couple of enhancements like _NEWIMAGE for bigger screens, etc.  And as such, QB64 was more than completed in its SDL form back when it survived on N54 forum posts before even qb64.net.  The transition to OpenGL/freeglut was a false promise to get it more portable with smartphones and all that but doesn't look like it's happening (try QBJS!).  I can't say my experience with QB64 has all that evolved since the SDL days and so there's totally no place for all the corporate crap direction it's been taking recently. Thankfully the farce is over with now that Steve in charge!

[Tim]

@dcromley and @Tim

" " " "

So that's the past history. The present history is to get content up at this site, so search engines can get newbies here to experience the greatest hobby language ever made, and enjoy the support they need to get up and running. The future? Well like Mac said, "QBasic Forever."

Well that was fun, but it took me a lot longer to write this little slice of history than it did to create the accompanying hit single. It went tin on the Billboard Top Ten-Zillion Chart, just today!

https://staging.qb64phoenix.com/showthre...php?tid=40

Pete

Thank you very much for the history, Pete, and for all your efforts. I am so very new at any kind of programming (except for a lot of HTML and CSS--if that counts), but QB64 is it for me now. And I can vouch for how true QB64 is to the original, because I have been working through a book written for QBasic in 1993--with no issues whatsoever almost halfway through the book.

Tim