My first experience in programming was on DEC PDP-11 rebranded and sold as a kit by Heath as the H-11. My dad built it around 1976/77. It with a paper tape reader and punch, assembler and linker, and a BASIC interpreter. Later we upgraded it with a dual 8" floppy drive unit (as big as a tower PC case is now) and the Heath-branded version of DEC's RT-11 O/S. We had Assembler, Fortran, Focal,... and BASIC.<p>I learned to program by typing in games from Dave Ahl's original 101 BASIC Games, as published by DEC...which usually involved porting them from whatever dialect they were written in (there were several, all sold with different DEC systems) to the version we had. Younger folks shudder at the idea of spaghetti code; I've shuddered at the real thing.<p>I've used BASIC on the H-11, the Apple II, the CompuColor II, the Commodore Pet, the TRS-80, the DEC VAX, the Kaypro-4, the IBM PC, and some weird HP supermicro, the HP-98-mumble-mumble. In most cases I moved on to Pascal as soon as I could; but BASIC was the one that let me bootstrap myself into a career in software engineering.