[albrewer]

The company I used to work at started out in MS BASIC sometime in the early 80's. The founder is a mechanical engineer who started programming all the formulas he was using instead of cranking them by hand every time. In the 90's, he ported it to VB and turned it into a GUI application for Windows 3.1. In the early 00's, the company had to switch over to using C++ for a fair amount of the UI, but the core off the application is still that library of VB code (now VB.NET) that was started in the 80's, and the RAD tools for VB was what allowed them to stand out as a mechanical design program earlier than most of the other tools.