Comment by xp84

That’s super cool. I’m actually surprised if you had a PC in 2001 that it didn’t have QBASIC on it though. I think that was being shipped with Windows at least through Windows 98.

But of course, your solution to that was twice as good for your education than if you’d learned only BASIC so that’s good.

My experience was kind of similar except I was learning in the mid 90s and only had access to various flavors of BASIC, because all the computers my school had were from 1980-1987 or so. When I saw modern GUI computers though, I couldn’t understand how what I’d learned in the character-based world could be applied to the GUI paradigm, so I gave up on programming until the Web and PHP gave me a usable mental model to get back into it.