Answer:
The original BASIC of the 60s and 70s and the derivatives thereof which were popular in the 80s are fundamentally different than the current version of Visual Basic .NET. The older languages were designed for computers far less capable the today's machines, and as such, they are primitive, limited, and barely structured, a striking contrast with Visual Basic .NET which is a modern, fully-featured, objected-oriented language with generics, operator overloading, lambda expressions and more. The hallmark of BASIC-family languages: extensive use of English keywords, is about the only remaining similarity.