23. I started when I got bored of the games on the computer my parents had at the time, and I started opening random programs and eventually ended up in the QB3.0 editor. After early attempts at using it as a word processor failed (it kept complaining about syntax errors when I moved the cursor off the line) I asked my dad, and he showed me how to do
PRINT "Hello from the Computer"
And I worked my way up from there with the help system, and a lot of trial and error.
It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.
I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)
It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.
I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)