Back in the Windows 3.1 and 95 days, Visual Basic was a godsend. There were tons of 3rd party utilities and games as a result and people could knock out programs to handle one-off problems for themselves.
Yup.
Now the excess baggage to actually PROGRAM something these days is horrendous!
And USB support was radical, along with HDs over 2GBs, and support for over the same amount of ram, at a cost of around 1,000. I threw away a PC that cost 1200 new, and was picked up by the metal recycle guy.