The vault · 26
The Site Directory
The old depot published one of these too, a human-readable map of the whole site. This is the modern equivalent: every page in the magazine, grouped the way the editors think of it, one click from anywhere.
In 2011 the old site carried a sitemap.html of its own, a hand-maintained index for readers rather than crawlers. The depot restores the custom. Everything the magazine publishes lives below, grouped by the shelves the editors actually use; the machine-readable version for crawlers sits separately at /sitemap.xml. Keeping the human version accurate is itself an exercise in choosing web tools: a directory stays true only as long as the machinery behind it stays simple enough to edit by hand.
01The story
- The Complete History of Visual Basic · from Tripod to VB6, version by version.
- Alan Cooper and the Making of Thunder · the father of the form designer.
- Visual Basic Timeline: 1988–2026 · every release on one page.
02The dialects
- Visual Basic 6.0: The Classic · the compiled RAD tool.
- VBA: The Automation Heart of Office · the dialect that never retired.
- VBScript: The Glue Era · ASP pages and logon scripts.
- VB.NET and the Great Split · the successor that broke the community in half.
03The craft
- The IDE That Invented RAD · toolbox, property grid, event wiring.
- The Code Depot · classic snippets, annotated.
- Migrating VB6 Applications Today · keep, wrap, convert or rewrite.
04The vault
- The Tutorial Tradition · how VB was taught.
- Build the Bouncing Ball, Twenty Years Later · the canonical lesson, rebuilt.
- Downloads: The Shareware Economy · ZIP files and registration fees.
- The News Archive, Reconstructed · four dispatches of 2004.
- ActiveX: Controls and the COM Bridge · the plug socket era.
- The Consultant Economy · the independents' decade.
- How VB Skills Were Taught · classrooms, CDs, certifications.
- The Link Directory Culture · the search engines we made ourselves.
- Link to Us: Buttons, Banners and Webrings · the 88x31 folk art.
- Advertising on the Early Web · impressions, pop-unders, receipts.
- The Guestbook · social media before social media.
- The Site Directory · this page.
05The depot
- The front page · start here.
- Where Classic VB Lives On · forums, archives, twinBASIC.
- About VB Depot · who publishes this and how.
- Contact · corrections, tips, letters to the editor.
- Privacy · the short version: nothing is tracked.
A directory page is also a promise: nothing published here is more than two clicks from anywhere else. If you arrived from an old bookmark whose page no longer exists under its old name, the about page explains the domain's long sleep and the magazine that replaced it.