I hadn't seen that story before, thanks for pointing to it. Lots of great stories on folklore.org! I recommend it to anyone interested in the early days of Macintosh.
I don't think there is a Visual Basic side to the story. Our work was many years after those sorry events.
In fact I never saw the source code for any of the Apple or Microsoft Basics, not even the "Basic" side of Visual Basic. Our team built the "Visual" side of it, code named Ruby. (No relation to the programming language.)
Originally Ruby wasn't going to be combined with Basic at all. It was going to be a user-customizable shell for Windows 3.0. Instead of Program Manager and File Manager, you could create your own desktop with things you wanted on it.
Ruby had a very primitive scripting language, but the language API was designed to allow other interpreters to be plugged into it.
Microsoft later decided to scrap the "shell" idea and create Visual Basic instead.
I don't think there is a Visual Basic side to the story. Our work was many years after those sorry events.
In fact I never saw the source code for any of the Apple or Microsoft Basics, not even the "Basic" side of Visual Basic. Our team built the "Visual" side of it, code named Ruby. (No relation to the programming language.)
Originally Ruby wasn't going to be combined with Basic at all. It was going to be a user-customizable shell for Windows 3.0. Instead of Program Manager and File Manager, you could create your own desktop with things you wanted on it.
Ruby had a very primitive scripting language, but the language API was designed to allow other interpreters to be plugged into it.
Microsoft later decided to scrap the "shell" idea and create Visual Basic instead.