[RyLuke]

I wrote a long form history of Visual Basic[0] awhile back that covers the origin of the product and how it ended up being married to BASIC at Microsoft.

tl;dr: VB started out as a project called "Tripod" (later "Ruby"), written by Alan Cooper (of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" fame) and a small team of developers. It was originally a Windows shell construction set, but Alan sold it to Microsoft where it languished on the shelf for awhile.

Bill Gates eventually decided that he wanted to marry the visual UI building aspect with BASIC and handed the project off to Scott Ferguson and the Business Languages Group, who were maintaining Microsoft's QuickBASIC IDE, the BASIC compiler, and developing a new language engine (dubbed Embedded Basic) for inclusion in a relational database product codenamed Omega (which would go on to become Microsoft Access).

[0] https://retool.com/visual-basic/