Visual Basic Thunder began in the year 1997. Originally, this Web site was known as Ben's VB5 Page. The logo was very ugly and you had to download a VB5-made ActiveX control to get anywhere on the site. At that time, the Visual Basic ActiveX craze was just beginning - a beta of Visual Basic 5.0, Control Creation Edition, had just been released to the public.

  Needless to say, Ben's VB5 Page was not popular to start out with. Not many people were willing to download an ActiveX control just to navigate the site - and that was only possible for visitors who used Internet Explorer 3.0!

  Time went on, and eventually my site-making skills improved. I drew up a flashy new logo, streamlined the navigation, and added a load of new content, including a lot of source code. Ben's VB5 Page eventually got to the point where it was receiving around 500 visitors per day. However, I was still unhappy with the rather generic name of my site.

  In 1998, Ben's VB5 Page gave way to Visual Basic Thunder, the name that this site uses today. I fell back onto a difficult to read color scheme - apparently, my site-making skills still needed some work.

  In 1999, Visual Basic Thunder got its own URL - www.vbthunder.com - and debuted with a new look, somewhat like the look it has now. I fiddle with the interface and content layout every now and then, to keep things interesting.

  The next major update came in 2002. The layout changed a little, but the major revision in this version was the underlying structure of the site - VB Thunder was now data driven! I'd had a lot to learn about accessing databases from ASP in the process, but building the backend was a good experience.

  More than 2 years later, I've moved to a new web host and have moved from my old ASP server scripts to PHP. Visual Basic Thunder is about eight years old now, by my reckoning, and there's no end in sight.

Thanks for dropping by!

- Ben Baird, Webmaster