1993. Despite all of the problems with VB, it was So Much Fun (twitter.com)

We don’t need to justify using VB, Access, Front Page or Publisher to anyone.

In some sense VB was ahead of time with its 'automatic' event mechanism and it total transparent interproces communication based on the fact that all objects are COM objects. No need to use JSON or protobuffers when sharing an object among processes, because of the automatic marshalling that was done when calling a method on an object from another process.

Most of this got lost when VB.NET was introduced.