One of my favorite free items was course on VB which came on 6 VHS cassettes

They still do this in a formal way and i promise i don't work for MS in any way; It's called Microsoft for startups and you sign up with vague details about a startup and they throw 5 enterprise visual studio keys and 5 full office subscriptions your way along with a few thousand dollars of azure hosting credits to get you hooked. About 20 years ago the Microsoft for Startups program included the full MSDN subscription which was ~5 keys for every product they ever made. 5 keys of Windows XP, 5 keys for windows server, 5 keys for 2000, 5 keys for every variant of Office. Very popular at LAN parties and they never did recall any of those keys. Today it seems they just give you developer tools and office, not the OS.

One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6 was a telephony capable IM program. Over dial up! The IM portion was simple logic but the real-time voice was a challenge back then because audio compression was in its infancy. The few real-time compression libraries that existed were expensive to license and some even required royalties. Way out of my league. Writing my own compression algorithm was way beyond my abilities. There weren't any VHS courses on that topic yet haha. My solution was to use the recording tool that came with VB6 to record low quality WAVE files. Since they weren't compressed, the playback was very forgiving. I was able to pull out a chunk of data from the wave recording, put it into its own file, and it would play that section of audio without a problem. So, that's what I did. I used the recording tool that was included in VB6 to record a master file whene…