That's ironic. About 40 years ago I was dating a gal a couple years younger than me and she was still in college getting her degree in education to become a teacher, I was already working as a young engineer. One of her classes was a simple software class to expose future teachers to the Basic programming language. She had a project due in a few weeks, to create a simple but educational children's game in the Basic language. She asked me to help (do it all).

I had never written in Basic, written any code on a PC, or worked with graphics ... my knowledge was only on mainframes writing in Fortran, Pascal and C at the time. We agreed to create a spelling game based on Hangman. About 3 hours later it was done, clean code, meaningful variable names complete with full comments so she could better explain exactly how it worked to her professor. I think the platform was an apple 2. The code worked great, the very basic graphics were sufficient and it was fun to play. She got an A++, and the Professor asked her if she had help writing it, she admitted her boyfriend helped. I wrote it too well, but her Professor loved it.

My first experience ever with Basic. A fond memory. And guys, yes, I reaped many rewards of appreciation from her for that effort.

40 years ago if you wanted "The Best" whatever you bought MicroSoft (they had a big 'S' then). The best linker, assembler, compiler, whatever. Whatever. There was no question. The difference then is that their target demographic was engineers and scientist, who demanded better.

Now they are just evil greedy bastards that sell shit by the shovel load because the dumb masses never hold them accountable for anything better.