This was pretty much my route too. BBC Basic (Albeit on an Acorn Electron). Whilst my friends we're rocking the much "cooler" Spectrums, i didn't have people to swap games with so got my interest in programming there. Is interesting how parents decisions to buy the "wrong" computer got me started in the right direction.
The BBC computer with BBC BASIC was good. I used it some; I didn't have one, I used the one in the British Library in Chennai (Madras), from where I also got tons of good computer books to read, over some years while in college. (I used to max out the four-book allowance and borrow that many at a time to take home to read :) Apart from supporting just BASIC programs, it had the feature of allowing you to drop down to inline 6502 assembly language, just by including all the assembly language statements between square brackets, one statement per line.
I also used a few other micros like the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC Jr. for a while.
Here is one post I wrote about it:
Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:
