It was incredibly frustrating for me as a young child, during the DOS days you had a fairly complete, if somewhat primitive, simple development environment with complete documentation available. I could easily do silly things like composing "melodies" or draw arbitrary shapes on the screen. Of course in retrospect any other programming language other than QBasic would have been more educational, if it had similar good documentation and integrated support for running programs. But it was still better than with windows, where there really wasn't anything comparable available that I knew of and visual studio (which I got as a christmas present, when I was 10 years old :)) seemed rather incomprehensible in comparison.