Pretty much the same. Started with QBasic though; then
'graduated' to VB (5.0?). My first 'cool' program I remember was in QB, it was kind of like a shell for DOS, that had the looks of Windows 95 with a start menu and all - rendered completely in text. We called it Access or something. Did it with 2 of my friends; as luck would have it - one guy is now the CTO of my present company and the other one is the CEO (who has no clue about programming anymore!).