I felt very inspired when I first controlled a LED using QBasic and the LPT1 (printer) port, back in 1996. It just felt like "so much power"!

(Was more or less similar to the photo)

When I was in school I had some guys walk up to me and asked:

G: Are you Feeno?
Me: Yes, what's up?
G: We need our FY project on school management system done.
Me: Okay?
G: How much will that cost us?
Me: *confused because I was still a freshman. At that point the only programming language I knew was elementary qbasic. I couldn't even write a hello world program without the help of Google*
So played along because yes we're talking about money here.

Me: It will cost you guys N amount of money (*improvised deep voice*).
G: Okay. Fair price.
* Right there they transferred half the requested amount to me. *
Holy moly! This guys aren't joking around. I don't know shit! They clearly mistook me for a senior student whose first name is Feeno, to me that was a nick referred to me by my friends.

I'm in this one for sure and it's a do or die transaction cus I'm returning no fucking money. I told my friends what had happened and they insisted I return back the money to the students and admit I can't deliver the project they were requesting.
Fuck all of yah! I'm keeping this money. Same afternoon I visited the school library with the intension of writing the code using the help of YouTube tutorials. I didn't find anything useful for qbasic as I thought I could write a full fledged school management system using qbasic.

I was lucky enough to find an existing source code on Codeproject, God bless that Indian guy. The source was in PHP and the tutor gave a step by step guide to setup XAMP and MySQL. I really don't know PHP but I guess source code modification is a natural skill to all programmers as I was able to modify the code to meet the requirements of the students (i.e school name, logo and other minor changes).

Most of what I learnt in programming came from modifying the source of that project. I learnt how to connect a PHP source to a MySQL database, I learnt about functions and their usage, I learnt the basics of HTML, I really learnt a lot and I would say that the speed at which I learnt was proportional to the amount of pressure I received to deliver.

That was how my journey as a full stack developer started. By chance maybe.

If u remember this, now think how old are u... 💾

When I was a kid I programmed a musical tune in QBasic (1994). It was magic. That "beep blips woin blop tuuuuu blups" coming out of the 386 builtin speaker just sounded like: "World, you are the next".

I was 11-12, the year was 1995. My mom was so sick of me screwing up the business computer (286), she bought me an old XT at a garage sale. It had a monochrome monitor and a 40 kB HDD. I taught myself qbasic on it. I knew right there I wanted to build stuff in code for a living.

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

How old were you guys when you started writing code? What language and what inspired you?

My first programming memories come from writing some QBasic text-based RPG and graphics demos when I was like 12. I remember moving into C/C++ soon after with Borland's C++ compiler and playing around with WinAPI and OpenGL 1.

CLS
FOR i=1 to 10
PRINT 'B'
PRINT 'I'
PRINT 'T'
PRINT 'C'
PRINT 'H'
NEXT i

@Gilles had a similar rant and reminded me of a story...

As a kid I learned QBasic. Moved to VB5 and later VB6. Because of this 'knowledge', I was the one who had to maintain legacy applications at my previous job. All of those applications were in use at various banks. On first work day in 2011 all hell broke loose - no date input control would accept the date anymore. I quickly discovered that the max year on date inputs was set to 2010. Later, I was told that nobody expected these applications would still be used in 2010 so they entered it as a distant future number. The funny part was that one bank was still running apps written in VB3 and I had to go back to basics. Didn't even know how to edit basic controls in that interface :D

Good times :)

beginning to learn QBASIC as i'm looking to port my demoscene stuff from TI-BASIC (based on QB) to MS-DOS. Graphics are weird here and i can't just drop in Assembly snippets so scrollers are gonna be a bitch. However...

Screen mode 13's kinda nice, ngl.

How I learned to program:

My father installed a DOS VM on my eMac when I was 7 and started learning in QBASIC. In my opinion, it's still one of the best ways to get started with programming due to its simplicity.

The "AH"-moment when as a boy discovered that with this instructions in QBasic I could literally let the thing do *anything*.
The "HA"-moment only little afterwards that I'll probably never have a clue what a worthwhile thing to make it do would be.

Commodore 64 and manuals when I was 5. Then qbasic on a 286 my dad got from work when I was 6. Been programming since, to Borland c/c++, php, html etc. Worked with most languages since.

I wrote my first code in 5th grade in QBasic, together with a friend who introduced me to it. We made a math "game", with hard coded problems, so you'd get the same questions everytime you played ;D

I want to hack central bank website.so I asked my teacher and he told me , go and learn q basic . then I bought programming with qbasic in 21 days....
Fuck that motherfucker teacher

When I was 12 i had a Friday afternoon course, as they called it, in QBasic. Nothing fancy but I learned that 'I wanted to work with computers'.
10 years later I got my first programming job. It was with the old Cognos Powerhouse language on OpenVMS. Does anyone remember that?
I had that job for 4 years and it took me another 10 (and several other IT jobs) before I started to learn Java, which I do now for 2 years.

That's my career story in a tiny nutshell 😎

As for most, began with 'Hello World' in Qbasic.

In elementary school, when I got my first computer (a 286 with b/w monitor and a whopping 8mhz), I discovered that a .bat file was nothing more than a set of instructions.

So my first "programs" where nothing more than .bat files. Then, at summer camp, one of the instructors noticed I was kind of a nerd, so he introduced me to QBasic. Later on, a friend of my mother showed me Turbo Pascal 6.0. So I was already creating games when I left elementary school.

Then, on secondary school, I stopped most of my programming stuff and was mostly interested in drawing and making music.

But, on college I rediscovered programming with Flash, HTML, PHP and Director. This was around the time that AS2 and PHP4 were still cool.

Later on, in university, I became nerd full on, but still the main focus on web development.

all QBASIC tutorials:

"your scrollers need something to scroll from, so always hold a screen mirror in an array, draw to that and blit it to the screen"

but like

i can scroll anything on screen in Mode 13 with PEEK/POKE. In like... 7 lines? Probably 5 if I fuck with it some?

it's even fast enough to only take 3 frames to scroll one pixel on a 2GHz vCPU!

Got my QBASIC demopart ready for testing, completely optimized and ready to roll. Found 486 owner (33MHz, 8MB of RAM) who tested it for me.

Takes 13 seconds for the scroller to draw each frame at 300x200.

No possible optimizations are present, everything's crushed as far as it'll go, meaning a completely different method of scrolling is needed.

(Still faster than the array method by 37 seconds per frame, but y'know...)

fuck me...

When I first discovered QBASIC installed on my machine, cracked open the source code to Gorillas, and tried changing it to see what would happen.

Qbasic and commodore 64. :) little did i knew that would lead me to the world of c and c++ lol.

Me: "Look mom, I made a quiz game in QBasic"

Mom: "Ok, now go play outside"

My dad bought me a book on QBASIC when I was around 7 or 8 years old, and within a month I decided I was going to be a game programmer when I grew up. That's not where I ended up, but that's how the journey started. My parents were both pretty supportive of that decision.

Once upon a time I was a student. We had QBasic programming with graphics involved in it. Once I was thinking about animation as we were told in the classroom. In order to perceivably move an object, we were supposed to draw the object, erase the screen, give some delay then draw the object again at a slightly different position....repeat the same thing all-over...
I suppose I had not done this exercise even once.. I might have seen it happen at our labs, I did not like it.. because I was clearly able to make out that screen is clearing...there was too much fluctuation..it did not look good as an animation..
I tried to better the process by redrawing in black color instead of calling a clearscr() routine and keeping all other things same.

I had also put an infinite outer loop so that I can see the process all over again after the circle (it was a circle I was moving btw), started from one end of screen and reached the end of screen.

As I hit F5, I was so impressed by the results...that I kept staring at it for 10 passes of the circle.. it was pretty darn smooth..

I started programming when I was 10. MS LOGO was being taught to us in school. I then started learning QBASIC when I was 12. When I was 15, I started coding in Java. Since then coding has become my source of bread and butter. I feel I need to learn lot of things to call myself a hardcore programmer.

Startet programming when I was 6 on my dad's 286 in Qbasic and learnt other languages as I grew up. It was always this, hacking or psychology for me. In the end the ex told me she was pregnant while I was doing my thesis.
So then I knew I had to be a dev.

Started with qbasic when really young, by moding the tower game. Later got into a programming course where i picked php & Java, and lately got Python and golang from professor Google

I'd tinkered with computers for a long time but the breakthrough moment for me was a robotics class in elementary school where I programmed Legos in TC Logo.

That summer, I made a washing machine with multiple cycles and a door sensor to interrupt the cycles.

Soon after, I played with the code for Gorillas in QBasic to fix a race condition when running it on my 486 at home.

QBasic. Lots and lots of QBasic...

Trying to figure out how the below code works. Everything is straight forward. The code works as I ran it in qbasic in dos emulator.

But for the life of me I cannot figure out wth cap1 and cap2 are. I debugged the code and saw values being set, but I cannot figure out where the data is coming from. I assume it is somehow related to the function declarations. Been 20 years since I did anything with qbasic. Maybe some other old fogie can tell me what is going on here:

DECLARE FUNCTION integrate (sample, cap, tc)
DECLARE FUNCTION differentiate (sample, cap, tc)
COMMON SHARED accumulator
CONST pi = 3.14159
SCREEN 9: CLS

FOR timeConstant = 10 TO 600 STEP 100
accumulator = 0

FOR a = 0 TO 22 STEP .01
wave = 0
FOR h = 1 TO 10
wave = wave + SIN(a * h) / h
NEXT h

lopass = integrate(wave, cap1, timeConstant)

IF wave > lopass THEN
trigger = 1
ELSE
trigger = 0
END IF

hipass = differentiate(trigger, cap2, 20)

PSET (a * 30, 50 - wave * 20), 15
PSET (a * 30, 50 - lopass * 20), 14
PSET (a * 30, 100 + timeConstant / 4 - trigger * 15), 2
PSET (a * 30, 270 - hipass * 20), 15

NEXT a
NEXT timeConstant

END

FUNCTION differentiate (sample, accumulator, tc) STATIC
fsample = tc
leakage = 1 - EXP(-2 * pi * 1 / fsample)
capAvg = leakage * accumulator
accumulator = accumulator - capAvg + sample
differentiate = sample - capAvg
END FUNCTION

FUNCTION integrate (sample, accumulator, tc) STATIC
fsample = tc
leakage = 1 - EXP(-2 * pi * 1 / fsample)
capAvg = leakage * accumulator
accumulator = accumulator - capAvg + sample
integrate = capAvg
END FUNCTION

The output looks like the image.

My dad used to buy me science books for kids which came with a qBasic program.
I basically learned by trying to Lake them work and reading the qBasic documentation.

I coded a Nibbles knock-off on QBasic in elementary school. I kept picking around the edges of coding (HTML, LaTeX, scripts for research tools like R, Praat, etc) and just recently got serious about it.

```
f = FREEFILE
OPEN test.gfx FOR BINARY AS #f
```
QBasic:
"Type Mismatch: 'AS #f'"

this is literally 1:1 example code with the filename changed, wtf

Back then as teenager meddling around with QBasic I intuitively realized that you could instruct this machine to do whatever I want - now I could stick the Turing-Church-Hypothesis label to that notion, but I think the experience and feeling of that potential power of programming goes without abstract algebra.
The problem of course: What to do with it? First thing we programmed was a digital telephone book. A chess program? - That's still the thing with apps nowadays I suppose. What should it do? Steer a nuclear power plant or recognize cats on pictures?

(As I didn't know what to do with it back then, I turned to physics and mathematics only to get a job all the university stuff was pointless for but required the skills I taught myself as a 17 year old.)

For me it was learning qbasic in highschool, my teacher was so passionate about programming, it stands out as the moment I knew I wanted to be a programmer. Thanks Mr Hill.

With having fun on 'QBasic' :D