A tribute to BASIC
The first programming language I learnt was BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). The interpreter I used was GW-BASIC (GW has no definitive expansion but usually called Gee Whiz) from Microsoft. The size of GW-BASIC interpreter was just 80Kb (remember? 1024 bytes make a kilo byte, so 80,000 bytes approximately). I am fascinated and thrilled whenever I think about this.
BASIC was not all that powerful like this generation programming/scripting languages. But it contained the core features of a programming language and a minimal of system functions. But to me it was the right language to start with. It helped me gain a lot of knowledge on the basics of computers and logic development. In 1990, 80Kb was still a significant size but still I could carry it on a 640 Kb floppy diskette with lot of my programs along with it (100 of those discs make a CD).
And if you didnt know this, the ancestor of Visual Basic, Visual Basic .Net, ASP and VB Script is BASIC. Microsoft had been very good at practicing and preaching Copy-Paste from the early days (QDOS -> MS DOS -> Windows, BASIC -> BASICA(IBM)/GW-BASIC(MS) -> QuickBASIC -> VB) 
