Atari basic in 1991 when I was 9 (remember simple FOR loops printing "trees"), BASIC with sprites on Yamaha MSX [1] consoles in 1993/1994, grew up on ZX Spectrum clones (Russian Hobbit [2]) since 1992 (including dabbling in Logo), GWBasic since 1993, QBasic a year later, Pascal since 1994 and dabbled in C in 1995. Clearly remember pointers sucking: having to figure out whether to pass in char * or char whether to stick an & in front of the string, etc.
ZX Spectrum was the shit though, as a kid. It had everything you wanted: BEEP command to make tones (so you could make music!) and user-definable 8x8 characters [3]. I remember sitting down with graph paper, drawing a grid of 8x8 spaces, outlining something neat like a helicopter, then tracing out the pixels. Then it was trivial to just "PRINT" your custom characters and make things move around.
ZX Spectrum was the shit though, as a kid. It had everything you wanted: BEEP command to make tones (so you could make music!) and user-definable 8x8 characters [3]. I remember sitting down with graph paper, drawing a grid of 8x8 spaces, outlining something neat like a helicopter, then tracing out the pixels. Then it was trivial to just "PRINT" your custom characters and make things move around.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX 2 - http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/hobbit.html 3 - http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap14.htm...