[dspillett]

> I know that QuickBasic and Visual Basic existed and could create binaries.

Very small binaries. Unfortunately you had to include the rather large run-time libraries with them (BCOM*.LIB or vbrun*.dll respectively). IIRC vbrun300.dll was >300MByte which was rather large at the time, as well as the library functions it contained an interpreter and your executable wasn't fully native code (your code was transpiled to something the interpreter could process more efficiently, and the executable had a small chunk of native code to load the RTL and get it to execute the rest). IIRC VB6 was the first version to properly compile to native code.

[mattl]

394KB, which I'm sure you meant... but nothing compared to anything from today.

[dspillett]

Sorry, yes my scale was off, I meant ~400KByte nor MByte. More than a quarter of a common formatted floppy (half even, given 720KByte-less-overhead disks were far from rare at that point).

[teh_klev]

Indeed:

https://archive.org/download/vbrunDLL

[masfuerte]

For comparison, my professional vb3 work was done on a computer with a 200MB hard disk. The word2 exe was about 1MB.

[wvenable]

There were 3rd party replacement libraries the QuickBasic standard libraries that were much smaller and faster.