Visual Basic had a massive advantage in that the window would always be the same size, or at least the same aspect ratio.

You just placed controls at absolute coordinates and they worked. When you ran the program it always looked exactly the same as in the editor. Later Windowses could scale it up by a constant factor for high-DPI displays.

In hindsight it's an excellent use of the KISS principle. We didn't need layout managers. Yes the window couldn't be maximised, but so be it, this was fine for many windows. If you did want that then you had to recalculate the widget positions yourself.

Exemplary of this style, I think, is the Windows 95-98 display settings window. The one every kid discovered because it was quickly accessible by right clicking the desktop and selecting "properties".