QBasic gave me my start in PC programming when I was a freshman in high school. When I was younger, I learned to code on my Commodore 64. I loved QBasic so much I saved up every penny I could to buy the QuickBasic Compiler. One thing I missed from that era was how much documentation came with software. The book for it was HUGE! Tons of detailed code examples taught me so much.
I was also raised on QBasic. My friend and I created epic games such as School Blaster, Gorilla Grenades, Echo the Dolphin (not the same), BipBop, even our own version of Paint that supported undo and could save images to disk.
Sadly I lost the floppy containing our collection.
Qbasic was also my first language too. A friend and I spent the evening drawing a face on the screen then updating it so it moved back and forth. No formal training or anything, just childhood curiosity and experimentation. It is very approachable language for a novice.
Such things were also my start into programming (after finding and reading the GWBASIC manual twice). Later followed by Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic and much later by many other languages.
I've been wondering recently what the equivalent for today's kids would be (my children aren't that old yet, but the day will likely come). In terms of ubiquity and being able to immediately start, JavaScript would come close, but it's orders of magnitude more complex in my eyes. Perhaps things like Scratch or SmallBasic for trying out things on their own. But these days we also have ubiquitous documentation, tutorials and other things on the web, so basically everything is a lot more approachable than decades ago ...
