"Visual Basic, I sold that to Microsoft in 1988. And that was pretty much the end of it. <laughter>... It was finally released as VB in 1990, I think?” 1

"I shepherded it to delivering at Microsoft, and then they took it to final release." 2

"This is one of those things—I don’t know if it’s the tech world, or if it’s the world in general, but the things that are a success are kind of accidental, and weird combinations of people contribute to them, and you never know where it comes from. “ 3

“And the stuff that has turned out to be big and prominent in my life are things that are not necessarily the stuff that I would say is the most significant that I’ve done.” 4

"The things in my life that have given me money, have not necessarily been the things that I thought were worth money; and the things that I thought were worth a lot of money, some of them have just quietly slipped beneath the waves, and not made me a nickel.” 5

"And it’s just—it’s a funny world out there. The things that people come around and say, “Oh, Mr. Cooper, you’re the greatest! You’ve done this amazing thing!” I look at it and go, “Yeah, I knocked that off in a weekend!”” 6

"And the things that my heart and soul are in, nobody knows about. It’s one of the conundrums of this world, certainly of my world. So you learn as you get older, you learn a kind of equanimity, just move on. Whatever! That’s the thing about innovation.” 7

Taken from the transcript of an oral history I gave to the IEEE Computer History Museum. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9263263 8