I loved this article. I could relate to so many aspects of it.

I learned to program using BASIC when I was 14 -- back in 1977 - when my dad, an engineer at Hewlett Packard in Rancho Bernard (CA) would bring home a terminal with an accoustic coupler. I would connect to the HP 2000 at the main office, and play "Adventure" -- the first text adventure game (created by Will Crowthers).

Shortly therafter, I discovered a book by David Ahl (still available on Ebay) called "101 Basic Computer Games" and I was off and programming in days! I started programming my own text adventure games. I even programmed a poetry program that wrote one of my favorite (albeit random) poems called "Our Fresh Death" (second only to another poem it wrote called "A Dirty Life"). I recently found these in a box in the garage and read them to my wife, and we had a good laugh!

ANYWAY, I wanted to write and say that I found and downloaded a version of QBasic that runs on windows XP. Here's how to do it . . .

• Go to: http://www.geocities.com/area51/5967/qbasic.html and download QBasic (Olddos.exe)

• Create a C:\qbasic folder

• Copy the file into that folder

• Run it – and extract the files.

• Once the files are extracted, you can run the QBASIC.EXE file and it will run!

David Brin's analogy of working on cars is well taken -- how many of us can fiddle around with the computer-controlled components under our cars' hoods anymore? It's not like the old days of fiddling with my mustang's carb using a screwdriver . . . Object-Oriented languages and .NET has come a long way -- but there still should be an exciting a fun way for kids to get into programming . . .

I guess I'll show QBasic to my son this weekend -- but he'll probably consider it strangly simplistic, shrug, and instead log back into World of Warcraft. My hat is off to David Brin's son for enjoying the simplistic-yet-fascinating world of programming in BASIC!

- Paul Wade (San Diego, Calif.)