Nkrs
I loved Visual Basic 6 because it could, even for a more complex program or a game with graphics, produce small binaries that could run on any Windows box. For me, this was a good fit - I could make a program, compile it, then copy the executable file to a floppy disk (with room to spare) and give it to my friends. Every Electron app that I've encountered is about 100 megabytes in size. Regardless of what anyone thinks, this is not progress.
Nkrs
Don't know much about things that far back. I tried making a couple of small GUI programs for trivial tasks (like these: sheepfriends.com, but for Linux), and there's nothing comparable to VB. Shoes for Ruby was probably the best attempt to make GUI programming approachable and simple.