I was very lucky that once I'd outgrown QBasic, my father could get me a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 while it was current, because he worked at the major University in our state and could access it through their campus-wide MSDN subscription.

I played with Visual Basic at the start but was keen to learn C++ because I had heard it was used in systems programming (I had the dream of developing my own operating system). A bit later on I did stumble on homebrew OS dev and started using DJGPP (a Windows port of GCC) but having access to Visual C++ was a very important step!