Introduction to Visual Basic History of Visual Basic VISUAL BASIC is evolved from the earlier DOS version called BASIC . BASIC means "Beginners Allpurpose Symbolic Instruction Code". It has been around for more than 35 years. BASIC was further developed as Visual Basic to make it compatible with today's environment. Microsoft created the enhanced version of BASIC , called visual basic. The bottom line of the enhancement is that VISUAL BASIC can create Windows programs whereas BASIC could only create DOS programs. It means that BASIC programming is done in a text-only environment and VISUAL BASIC programming is done in a graphical environment.