My memory is hazy, but didn't VB not come out until the mid/late 90s? That was the era when "build it all yourself" began to die... Other systems from that vintage included COM, DHTML, Java, MFC, GNOME, KDE, wxwidgets, etc.
VB6 was at probably peak popularity mid/late 90s which is why you probably remember it as just coming out even though it had been out for a while. That's one thing that's certainly different - the rate of growth and hype for new languages and technologies. The literal and figurative network effects today obviously allow stuff the ability to get hot so much faster.
