QBASIC 4.5 is responsible for my entire career in software engineering. As an 8yr old kid I was fully able to grok the documentation included in that environmen

QBASIC 4.5 is responsible for my entire career in software engineering. As an 8yr old kid I was fully able to grok the documentation included in that environment building games that emulated what I would play on my NES. Mostly it was just dumb Dragon Warrior-esque RPGs with HORRIBLE dialogue, first text-only then with full-blown graphics. In the early days of the internet there were tons of communities and forums and some of my first websites I published were dumb game websites where I'd publish my .BAS =) Before that I would tinker with Applesoft BASIC on a IIe my father brought home from Rockwell Collins... BASIC was/is such an approachable dialect for kids. After a few years tinkering I graduated to Pascal and C/C++ after an uncle unloaded all of his old Borland books on me. If it wasn't for BASIC teaching me programming fundamentals (variables, conditions, loops, "functions", etc) I don't think I would have been able to grok formal/more-powerful languages. At first I didn't have any resources/mentors/Google for programming so I really needed BASIC. BASIC will always hold a special place in my heart!