As they have gotten the pentium 2 (the top of the line, most expensive CPU in 1997) as a free hand-me-down computer & considering ubuntu first released in 2004,

As they have gotten the pentium 2 (the top of the line, most expensive CPU in 1997) as a free hand-me-down computer & considering ubuntu first released in 2004, the author probably got started at the earliest in the mid '00s - by then you'd probably get started with something like flash. But I agree QB was surprisingly long-lived, this 80s era tool probably lasted as long as Windows 98 (i.e. till XP became the "default" windows version).