Childhood BASIC Experiences

Thanks for sharing! This brings back so many memories. When I was 8 years old, my mother enrolled me in a programming summer camp at our local university. This was my first exposure to BASIC and that is what got me hooked. After that, writing BASIC programs on APPLE 2/2E throughout junior high and highschool was the thing to do. Switched to Visual Basic shortly after that... It started it all for me!

Yes! When I was about 6 or 7 I remember spending hours typing in a BASIC program from a book on a BBC Micro at school. It drew a circle on the screen and flashed different colours which I thought was the best thing ever. I couldn't figure out how to save it to disk after running it so I had to type it all out again the next day.

I starting learning how to write code in '91 (I was 10). My first language was LOGO, but after that I started learning BASIC. I remember trying to find any sort of books I could from the library, that talked about BASIC. It was tough going. I didn't have access to the internet (much less knew what it was). So I had to make do with these books that were often for different dialects of BASIC.In those days I was enamored with graphics and the idea of creating games, and it was dead sim

Good memories! I learned to program making silly games on a crappy computer in QBasic :)

QBasic was my first exposure to programming, when I was 9 years old. Fond memories. Despite it having what today I consider terrible syntax, it made programming extremely approachable. After a quick "hello, world" intro from an IT guy at my mom's office, I spent countless hours reading the help pages and learning the commands. Sometimes I wish programming could be as simple again.

I'm 21 and I started programming in 2002 on Sharp PC-1500. It was a BASIC computer, already way way too old for any purpose at the time but I had a great time with it. It all started with a loop, I immediately fell in love. Then I did a program that could tell how old you were, it first asked you your name and then it asked for your date of birth (the current year was hard-coded) and then the output was something like : "Hi Simon ! You are 8 years old." Then I did something that c

Cool stuff! Growing up in the 80s, my first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64.This came in handy when I did a commercial apprenticeship in the early 90s, as there was QBasic on the PCs we had and it was a great tool to kill time when there was nothing interesting to do. So I’ll always have some fond memories of QBasic.

I wrote a little bit of basic on C64, but I was around 9 years old and din't understand English well (I'm Danish).Later, I found QBasic and spent a few hundred hours messing around in that, the built-in index and manual with examples made it extremely nice for me, as I could always try out things where I didn't understand what they did from the description (still lacking English skills at that point). I mostly wrote stuff that used the lowres graphics mode and put stuff on scre

Same for me... 2nd grade, a colleague of my dad saw I liked playing on the computer and gave me some old BASIC programming books. I distinctly remember reading about PRINT and running to my mom and dad to tell them I could make the computer output something.This was in 1991 or so, and the books were from 1978..... I had no idea even where to TYPE the stuff I was learning into. My dad’s friend came over and gave me Qbasic. 30 years later, I still love to code.

BASIC was my door to programming and computers. I experienced it in my 7th grade in the late 80s when I had the fortune of one of my friends owning a Commodore 64. What a thrill it was, so many weekend afternoons vanished into thin air...