I'm sure that most people who had a computer before 1995 have some idea of what QBasic is. If not, I'll just have to tell you. It was Microsoft's basic development system, that got included with every version of Windows up to Windows 98, and it received such coverage worldwide that it would be very difficult to find people who started using computers back then who didn't have QBasic as the first programming language they learned. QBasic had a cousin program, called QuickBASIC, which cost money, but could compile BASIC programs into full EXE files (for DOS) - since Microsoft stopped releasing QuickBASIC, a huge underground following for the language has developed, with many sites releasing QuickBASIC programs.

Last year, a short e-mail forwarded by a school teacher placed me into an interesting situation. An invitation to sign up for the national computer programming competition. I never really considered entering it, until one of my friends asked me to.

Two weeks later, we had won our division, come third overall, and won a nice amount of money from it (it wasn't a bad return for two hours work).

I've never looked back.

Photo from the SEARCC Programming Competition in India in 2004.