[ygra]

Ha, I too found the GWBASIC manual at home in a bookshelf and just read it. Afterwards I asked my father whether he had GWBASIC somewhere and he provided me with QBasic, which had integrated help (so I didn't have to refer to that 500-page tome). From there I eventually went to Turbo Pascal and later Visual Basic and much later to lots of other languages.

I still wonder sometimes what the modern equivalent to learn programming would be. Most modern programming languages are infinitely more capable, but the hurdle to start is also a lot higher in many cases. JavaScript is probably equivalent in that it's available everywhere, but there's so much you have to at least understand a bit before you can really write some code ...