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Comment by vesche | Hacker News Reader

I posted some of the first code I ever wrote on these forums: http://www.petesqbsite.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=2357

I recovered it on some old hard drives a few years ago and backed it up here: https://github.com/vesche/snippets/tree/master/qbasic

Loved these forums as a young kid with nothing more than a windows 95 computer and a QBASIC interpreter.

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This is an interesting view into Qbasic's longevity; your posts are from 2007, long past its release date of 1992.

The suite itself predates popular use of the Web by a handful of years and yet the community's size seems to have peaked long after its release. I've been able to trace an active Qbasic community all the way to 2011.

It was also a pure accident that I started programming at all. This was 2007, I had inherited an old Windows 95 computer that was recycled from my Mom's law office where she was a paralegal. She let me rig it up in my bedroom as a teenager and I somehow discovered it came with QBasic 1.1 installed on it. I didn't know anyone who coded or programmed, and I learned everything from browsing around Pete's. I later discovered Python from the same forum, and well- I'm still coding 12 years later.

How I got started: the "big kids" at school showed me how to play Qbasic Nibbles on our school computers, circa 1999-2000. I remember the first things I did was try to add "cheat codes" to Nibbles, and then use PRINT/INPUT to make a joke DOS prompt.

About three years later I get a hand-me-down Windows 95 machine with Qbasic on it, and I set out to make my own "operating system". This was actually a pretty popular thing to do at the time...here's an entire website full of 'em, where I published my own MS-DOS GUI as a teenager: http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/

Today, I do very well as a senior developer wearing multiple programming hats at my company and I'm close to cashing in some of that stock to develop my own video game. It all started with Qbasic.

That's awesome. It seems that Qbasic inspired many, it being included with 95, 98, and Me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic#History

I'm a senior cyber security engineer and also a polygot :) Video games sound more fun, I still make some in my free time.

I know this is old news now, but I never knew this stuff existed! I wanted to make something similar back in the day. You've given me a rabbit hole of nostalgia to peruse, thanks :)

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