Nostalgia is high with this one :D I've started with gwbasic, then QBasic and moved up to "Visual Basic for DOS" (ncurses-style UI stuff, similar to Turbo Pasc

Nostalgia is high with this one :D I've started with gwbasic, then QBasic and moved up to "Visual Basic for DOS" (ncurses-style UI stuff, similar to Turbo Pascal iirc — I don't think many people even knew it existed since Win 3.11 was already big, but I loathed it and only switched to it because of... Trumpet Winsock for the internet!), but that did not stop me from playing with driving serial (COM) ports or parallel ports (LPT) with printer escape sequences. Not really FPGA level low (not even close), but DOS-based stuff was really easy to start hacking up!