Thanks for sharing your experience! I was hooked as a pre-teen by the interactive nature of programming, and the freedom it suggested. Just the idea that I could make a screen say whatever I wanted was enough to capture my imagination. (I was also a fan of choose-your-adventure stories and other gamebooks at the time, so I loved the idea of play between the content creator and the content consumer.) My first program was a question-and-answer fortune teller.

Unrelated side note: I’ve never tried Liberty BASIC, but several people have recommended it to me ever since I wrote about the history of VB. I’ll have to check it out sometime soon!