VisualAge was the name of a family of computer integrated development environments from IBM, which included support for a few popular (and not so popular) computer Programming languages.

Early history

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VisualAge was born in the IBM development in Cary, North Carolina. The Cary lab was established in 1984 and staffed at the time primarily with IBM employees transferred from Poughkeepsie, New York. The Lab had responsibility for application development tools. The EZ View dialog manager product, a personal computer derivative of the user interface elements of the ISPF 327x product was one of the products. The lab also had a group which was one of the early adopters of Object Oriented Programming technologies within IBM using an internally developed language called ClassC to develop applications with more sophisticated graphical user interfaces which were just starting to be widely available.

Eventually, with the availability of usable implementations of Smalltalk in for IBM PC-AT class machines allowed IBM advanced technology projects experiment with Smalltalk. At about the same time, visual interface construction tools were coming up on the radar screens. Smalltalk research projects such as InterCons by David N. Smith of IBM, and Fabrik by a team at Apple led by Dan Ingalls were building interactive graphical applications built from composition of graphical primitives. Higher level construction of user interfaces was evidenced by other tools such as Jean Marie Hulot's interface builder first done in Lisp and then evolved to become the NeXT interface builder tool in NeXTStep which allowed for building user interfaces by WYSIWYG composition of UI widgets which could be "wired" to each other and to application logic written in Objective-C. The original prototype which led to VisualAge was the implementation of an interface builder like tool within the Smalltalk/V development environment. By the time VisualAge was released as a product, much more emphasis was placed on visual construction of application logic as well as of the user interface. This emphasis was in part due to the "positioning" for "strategic" reasons of Smalltalk as a generator rather than a language within IBM's System Application Architecture.

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