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.