I've worked for a company with a large code base in Visual Basic .net. Product been in development since the 90's, with rich customer that only cares about their software doing its job. It's a surprisingly productive language combined with Visual Studio. Even though, as a language enthusiast, I barfed a bit now and then. Dev team would like to switch to C# but it would have been a multi-year effort taking away from lucrative feature requests.
that comment is probably referring to VisualBasic 6.0 which was not a dialect of C# like VB.NET but then again your product from the 90s likely started off as that