Yes! I have often wondered how many other kids had this experience. I too had my life changed by how convenient and complete QBASIC's help feature was.
When I was 12, my dad brought home a laptop that the company he worked at was going to throw away. He convinced them to let him take it home instead, and turned it into our home computer. My brothers didn't care about it, but I became obsessed with it. Stumbled into QBASIC just looking at all the executable files in DOS.
The help feature alone taught me about and how to program, at least enough to turn it into something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. (though notably I missed some very important features just by accident: for instance, I never learned that subroutines and functions existed until I actually took a real class in Pascal years later... I used a horrible rats' nest of GOTOs).
If it wasn't for that help feature, I'd probably have ended up a barista aspiring to get a novel published. Instead I became a (probably overly obsessed) software engineer, with complicated but mostly good outcomes. I'm 45 and retired now for example, and I certainly wouldn't be if I hadn't gone down this path. And I wouldn't have gone down this path if I hadn't randomly found QBASIC on that computer, and if the help feature hadn't been so helpful.
When I was 12, my dad brought home a laptop that the company he worked at was going to throw away. He convinced them to let him take it home instead, and turned it into our home computer. My brothers didn't care about it, but I became obsessed with it. Stumbled into QBASIC just looking at all the executable files in DOS.
The help feature alone taught me about and how to program, at least enough to turn it into something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. (though notably I missed some very important features just by accident: for instance, I never learned that subroutines and functions existed until I actually took a real class in Pascal years later... I used a horrible rats' nest of GOTOs).
If it wasn't for that help feature, I'd probably have ended up a barista aspiring to get a novel published. Instead I became a (probably overly obsessed) software engineer, with complicated but mostly good outcomes. I'm 45 and retired now for example, and I certainly wouldn't be if I hadn't gone down this path. And I wouldn't have gone down this path if I hadn't randomly found QBASIC on that computer, and if the help feature hadn't been so helpful.