My brother snagged an Atari 800XL from a vintage game shop when I was in elementary school, and I got the books and tapes for learning Atari Basic and wrote some very simple basic programs to make it ask for input and change screen colors.
QBasic shipped with DOS 6.1 and I spent a lot of middle school fooling with it. We wrote a ton of games a lots of little utilities until finally moving on to C.
