[wvenable]

You never got to the stage of pirating QuickBasic off of a BBS somewhere. I went from 8bit BASIC to QBasic to QuickBasic and then to VB. I even started writing some assembler and linking it with QB code.

QuickBasic and all the variants filled a niche that exists in multitudes now but did not exist in the early 90s. There weren't many high-level languages with garbage collection in common use.

[lholden]

I would have if any of the BBSs I was on had it :). I just downloaded a boatload of SLS Linux floppy images from a BBS instead! :D

[wvenable]

At that time I was developing on a 286 -- Linux was still far in my future.

But all my friends had pirated copies of every development tool. I don't know how we even got it all. We were lucky to be adjacent to a larger city and therefore have closer access to files and information.