I think Microsoft QBasic in particular was the sweet spot. It was an easy to pick up language and runtime that was powerful enough to make real productivity applications and games. It shipped with 2 great demo games, Nibbles and Gorillas, that were fun to play and easy to understand. It had a pretty good IDE and most importantly, easy to browse, beginner friendly online help. I couldn't imagine a better introduction to programming during my childhood. Best of all, it was installed by default in MS-DOS 5.0 and later.

I'm really hoping that it gets open sourced by Microsoft in the near future.