[andrewcarter]

Me too! I love QBasic so much - totally wouldn't be where I am today without it. I met a kid at summer camp when I was in middle school who told me he made his own games and fake computer viruses to scare his parents in Quick Basic. He mailed me a floppy disk with Quick Basic on it once we were home and I've been in love with programming ever since.

It's was the perfect first language. It's so easy to play little sounds or draw graphics, and the environment is basically non-existent so setup is easy. So much fun!

[merolish]

Very much agreed on the ease of graphics and sound, and its influence on me as a student -- I wrote a version of Pong in about 250 lines back in the 90s. A single line of music was as simple as PLAY and a string language to specify duration and pitch. SCREEN followed by LINE/CIRCLE/PAINT and you had graphics. GET and PUT gave you sprites. Some of the fine people on Prodigy provided their amateur games and tutorials.

If there's a modern equivalent I'd be interested to know.

[digi_owl]

QB64 basically is.

From the article you can do everything Qbasic could, but also load PNGs (_LOADIMAGE), fonts (_LOADFONT) and MP3s (_SNDOPEN).