Reverse engineering "Hello World" in QuickBasic 3.0(marnetto.net)
marnetto.net
Reverse engineering "Hello World" in QuickBasic 3.0
https://marnetto.net/2026/03/01/brun-hello-world
5 comments
Thanks for sharing your memories. I never had the privilege of having a BASIC compiler for DOS, my first one was Visual Basic 5. It was a marvel, producing really small exe files (one of my surviving samples is 15 kB). Granted, the executables were just P-code wrappers which needed VBRUN4.DLL to run, but it looked cleaner since the library was hidden in the system directory. DLL hell had some aesthetic advantages.
Yeah, DLL hell... ugh.
I have fond memories of Visual Basic. I still think it was one of the best tools for RAD (Rapid Application Development), you can definitely tell that .NET with WinForms borrowed heavily from it.
At one point, I remember they started including MSVBVM_X.DLL runtimes in the Windows OS, allowing you to shrink application size for distro even further which was nice.
I have fond memories of Visual Basic. I still think it was one of the best tools for RAD (Rapid Application Development), you can definitely tell that .NET with WinForms borrowed heavily from it.
At one point, I remember they started including MSVBVM_X.DLL runtimes in the Windows OS, allowing you to shrink application size for distro even further which was nice.
For your next quest: QuickBBS!
BBS software is a field I should get to know better. It was embarassing to consult Wikipedia to find out what “Door Patch v3.7” (a software I cite in the article) was supposed to be.
It’s been a while (obviously), but I always used to compile the QB-related runtime modules (QB 4.5) directly into the EXE itself, and the size of most of final binaries fit comfortably on a 1.44 MB floppy.
We later had a copy of Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1, which I believe was the last version of QuickBASIC before they moved to VB for DOS. I do remember the final file sizes being smaller so it's possible that it was more intelligent about pruning the library by only bundling the relevant calls pertinent to the source file.
> I would claim age is a factor, but my former boss, who started university before I was born, is now giving seminars on how to build a project from scratch using Claude Code.
I hate to be cynical (who am I kidding, no I don't) - but I'd wager everyone is playing this game. It's not because they're necessarily super passionate about AI - it's because giving the corporate equivalent of a TED talk is one of the low-hanging fruit to increase your visibility across the org.