I had the EXACT same experience as a kid. Found a GW-BASIC book on my parent's bookshelf, found out that QBASIC was bundled with Windows and it ran most sample

I had the EXACT same experience as a kid. Found a GW-BASIC book on my parent's bookshelf, found out that QBASIC was bundled with Windows and it ran most sample code that were in that book and it went downhill from there. When I was bored I loved reading the MS-DOS 6 manual cover to cover. Back when Internet access wasn't readily available the quality of documentation and sample codes were impressive.