[orangecomputer]

My experience level with computers was minimal; I had basic knowledge of running games from the DOS prompt or a particular type of DOS Shell that my dad had set up on our home computer.

Other than that, I had no knowledge. I didn't know anything about processor power, RAM, etc.

I'm not sure if it's used for anything anymore, but QBASIC is, I believe, freely available on Microsofts legacy FTP. It's a very safe and easy to use environment to learn about putting together some basic programs (hence the name BASIC?). If you learned to say, build a calculator in QBASIC, it wouldn't be hard to take that programming knowledge and move it across to a modern language like C.