Personally, many many years ago when I was fed up with QB's limitations, first versions of FreeBasic[1] were published and I made the switch. I haven't been following its development closely for some years now, but it seems the language has come a long way since then, e.g. supporting OO. It still can be told to behave QB-compatible, though. Maybe this is interesting for anyone looking for an open, more modern implementation of Basic.
[1]: http://freebasic.net
The DEBUG utility would let you write small utilities in Asm, and PC magazines would publish source code listings in a format suitable for use with it --- the assembler had no labels so any address calculations needed to be done manually, but IMHO that just made it easier for people to see how "code" and "data" are really the same thing interpreted in different ways. It was limited to producing "flat binary" COM files up to 64K in size, but you quickly realise that when using Asm, 64K is a lot of code and a lot of interesting things can be done with far less; most of these utilities were in the hundreds of bytes to single-digit-kilobytes range.
Compare that with today when a compiled "Hello world" binary in C is already larger than the majority of the utilities supplied with MS-DOS...
2000s: Computers come with a web browser that can run JS
2010s: Computers come with a web browser that can run JS and has some other tools
But what was available in the early 1990s, when IBM-compatible PCs had become cheap enough to have at home, but ~everyone ran DOS+Windows? I don't remember there being any way (unless you count BAT files) to easily get started writing programs.
For those who got their first taste of programming in the 90s, what language and compiler/IDE did you use?