Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1 User Interface Toolbox

[TerryRitchie]

Reminds me of VB for DOS using Ansii characters instead of graphics for all the boxes/dialogs.

Both toolkits used high-bit ASCII on CP437. But the VB-DOS one went further, had odd-looking dialog buttons that took at least three screen lines. It was quite unlike Turbo Vision with the goofy-looking button with black shadow "underneath".

Also VB-DOS began the concept of event-driven programming. Create a few hundred functions per application, meant to be filled in by the programmer, for any response in the GUI program. Meanwhile on earlier BASIC's by M$, BASIC PDS in particular, had to do like Freebasic and C++ and program a big fat "SELECT CASE... END SELECT", into the main module level code. depending on kinds of events generated by the program.

I have seen BASIC PDS source code only once for this toolkit, however, so I might be mistaken. But the event-driven thing in VB-DOS discouraged me totally from that one. This was before I discovered that one used "far" strings no matter what, and did a few other things to convince me it wasn't QuickBASIC anymore.

Here is a fascinating port of Turbo Vision:

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Visual basic 1.0 for Windows was actually introduced a year earlier than Visual Basic for DOS. The event driven programming was introduced by the Windows version, which I found quite fascinating and very easy to use. I switched to VBDOS as soon as it became available because of this. I mostly wrote programs to track and order inventory, perform purchase orders, create custom quotes, etc.. for the company I worked for at the time. VBDOS (and VBWIN) really streamlined that process for me. The ISAM database included with VBDOS was great too.