I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs.

Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.