I started with QBASIC in a command prompt within Windows 3. Definitely was hooked by the same things you mentioned - such as how quickly you can watch the compu

I started with QBASIC in a command prompt within Windows 3. Definitely was hooked by the same things you mentioned - such as how quickly you can watch the computer "do" what you told it. It gave me the bug and the rest is history. Nowadays, the closest I can think of is the interactive interpreter of python...but it's still not the same. Perhaps because python has orders of magnitude more libraries/functionality/gotchas out of the box. I think I would have been overwhelmed as a young teenager with all of that. Simple(and constrained maybe?) isn't such a bad thing for getting people their first taste.