In the beginning, there was BASIC and it was good. Really! I mean, really the beginning. And yes, really good. BASIC ("Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code") was designed as a language to teach people how to program by Professors Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth College w-a-a-a-y back in 1963. It was so successful that soon a lot of companies were using BASIC as their programming language of choice. In fact, BASIC was the very first PC language because Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800, the computer most people accept as the first PC, in machine language.
Visual Basic, however, was created by Microsoft in 1991. The main reason for the first version of Visual Basic was to make it a lot faster and easier to write programs for the new, graphical Windows operating system. Before VB, Windows programs had to be written in C++. They were expensive and difficult to write and usually had a lot of bugs in them. VB changed all that.