(1990s) The QuickBasic Era
My first real contact with a PC was with a Olivetti that my dad bought for the office. I was 13 years old. These days the PCs were booting with DOS and then could execute ‘WIN’ and you would have access to the first windows 3.1 operating system.
The computer had no sound device other then the beep and i remember dreaming about the SoundBlaster sound board. Then the MS Word and Paint i did not use many on that PC.
One of my sisters was studing Chemical engineering and she had a project of building a simulator for Fluid Mechanics. The simulator was build on QuickBasic and had a command line interface. The program would prompt for inputs and then preform some calculation and generate some charts.
The program was almost fully functional when i had the first contact with it but still had some problems. The existing coding allowed me to learn the basics of programming. By then was hard to get documentations or tutorials and the Internet was not available still in Portugal. However with what i learn i was able to help my sister and solve some of the problems.
The Quick Basic was the first compiler i used. For the first time i could create EXE and not anymore just BAS files that needed the Basic Interpreter. It felt like a big conquest for me
