I read Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic and found this interesting quote:
“They weren’t called ‘controls’ originally. Alan was going to call them ‘waldos’, named after remote manipulator arms. I couldn’t make sense out of that name, so I called them ‘gizmos’. Microsoft must have thought this name was too frivolous, so they renamed them ‘controls’.”
I’ve been restoring my archives — 10,000,000 files from the past 13 years — and while I did so I had a little bit of a trip down memory lane. I found some old Visual Basic 6 database programs that I wrote when I was in high school, including a phone book, a diary, a time sheeting system, and a few other miscellaneous tools. In order to get them to run I had to get my compiler out to fix a few data object dependencies (DAO5) and a few hardcoded configuration settings such as the paths to database files. So I reinstalled my old VB6 development environment, which I’m pleased to say still works (although I’m still running Windows XP). Good fun. :)