[Minor49er]

When I was really young, I opened a few .exe files in Notepad to try to figure out how they were created. I remember at one point seeing all of the garbage character output and thought, "wow, someone wrote and understands all of this?"

[seryoiupfurds]

Conversely, I didn't have much luck renaming my basic programs to .exe.

[deckard1]

this is how I switched from GW-BASIC to QuickBASIC. I found out that QB could make .exe files like a big boy compiler.

Switching to QuickBASIC was like stepping into the future, coming from GW-BASIC. No more line numbers. Actual subroutines. A quite nice IDE that separates out subroutines similar to the code browser in Smalltalk/Squeak.