Comment Re:Cry Me A River (Score 1) 608
The author refers to COBOL which casts a wide net of possible timeframes. But he also mentions VisualBasic in the same breath. Plus, I have to think he's conflating Visual Basic with BASIC. (I'm pretty sure this is even the specific era he's referring to.)
FWIW, they are not the same - the former ruined the latter so far as its intended purpose goes. A pure - and early - example of MSFT's embrace and extend (extinguish) strategy. Which is actually somewhat ironic since they had one of the best implementations of BASIC around back then: Microsoft BASIC.
The reason I'm pretty sure he's conflating is that VB is much later and only a footnote, and doesn't really overlap timelines with COBOL as BASIC did.
So based on the evidence, I'm sticking with 1980's until the author clarifies.