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.
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.
