[otakucode]

Should have saved your allowance and bought the QuickBASIC compiler! I did and when I discovered that the textfile-reading program I wrote to handle huge files (at the time) would buffer keystrokes, fill the buffer, and beep annoyingly if I held down the 'Down' arrow or 'Page Down' keys, I was led into learning x86 assembler. Well, enough that I could use BIOS routines for displaying text and scrolling the screen. Also got to learn what a 'linker' did and how QB did argument passing on the stack. I still wonder if I was the only person in the world linking my assembly code into a QB app I also wrote. But hey, it worked!

[dguaraglia]

Haha, your story about hitting a wall with BASIC only to go somewhere else reminds me of how I decided to learn C: I had "mastered" QBASIC and was learning Visual Basic, so my dad bought me a book called "Hardcore Visual Basic". That book discussed extensively how to get Visual Basic to interact with the native Windows API for fun and profit. Pretty much every chapter began with "this is so much easier in C, but here's how we do it in VB", so wee me decided to hunt for a C compiler in the pile of Shareware CDs I had laying around. Finally found a really old version of Visual C++ (I think it was 2.1, so it was old even by the time) and then spend the next year of my life writing toolbar and common control libraries for lack of anything better to do :)