QBasic was my second, but first real, introduction to programming (first being VIC BASIC). I was told not to press escape (at some DOS menu manager), but I did.

QBasic was my second, but first real, introduction to programming (first being VIC BASIC). I was told not to press escape (at some DOS menu manager), but I did. Who knows how I wound up at QBasic. At some point I impressed some teenagers with a rainbow line on their full color screen, I was myself impressed with the experience: there was terminate-stay-resident called 'phix' that emulated VGA on a monochrome. phix broke the qbasic editor (blank screen), so I would have to make changes and then reboot (to clear the TSR) to try them out on my home machine. One thing I managed to do was to delete the entire source for NIBBLES.BAS (while the screen was blank due to phix), which my sister and I genuinely enjoyed playing. I just looked it up[1] and it was a mere 700 lines of quality BASIC. GORILLAS.BAS is one of my influential programs, and I want to write a competent spiritual successor to it one day. Edit: MONEY.BAS was also pretty awesome. I was too young to understand the idea behind it, but the ncurses-style UI and the random star background were great. Edit 2: I eventually wrote a tomagotchi game. It had a pretty awesome ASCII art intro sequence, but was plagued by a mistake of mine. `INKEY$` waits for an input key each time it was read, so an if-elseif-elseif-etc. would result in a kind of race condition. My instruction on the screen was essentially to "hold a key until it works." I eventually got hold of that machine 20+ years later and fixed the bug. [1]: https://github.com/tangentstorm/tangentlabs/blob/master/qbasic/NIBBLES.BAS https://github.com/tangentstorm/tangentlabs/blob/master/qbas...