QBasic... those were the days.

I actually started programming around 2002/2003. At that time QBasic was of course already horribly outdated. But that was what my school teacher was using. We used it to have direct PEAK/POKE access to the LPT-Port (the big, bulky printer port!). So we connected LEDs and other Stuff to the LPT Pins and made them blink with QBasic (and Windows 2000).

I still sticked to QBasic a while because i refused to learn anything else and C-Style languages just looked scary to me. By the way, if you are looking for a cool, modern, cross-platform BASIC Compiler take a look at FreeBasic. It started out as a QBasic-kompatible Interpreter but now is a Project on it's own.