Like many others, QBasic plus some library books comprised my start to programming and totally changed my life. A few of my most vivid childhood memories were sitting in a closet with a humming MS-DOS computer, smelling hot plastic and finessing how to use SCREEN 7 so I could place my game's background on one page and sprites on another. A huge "aha" moment was when I learned what arrays were, as they allowed me to use the same "enemy sprite" logic to place multiple enemies on the screen at once without requiring separate code. Another was when I devised and designed my own Zelda-like tile system so I could draw various map elements once and then encode each game screen as a simple string of letters. Nothing but love for those days and how they got me comfortable messing with code.