Yep, BASIC bootstrapped my programming interest even as late as the late 2000s. School library was ancient, the only programming books were on BASIC and internet access was limited. So I got started trying to use those to learn this: https://justbasic.com/ (surprisingly, updated even up till 2018, and the paid version updated just a few months ago).
As a clueless, overly ambitious 12 year old I was a massive annoyance for the skilled users on their forums, I remember getting ranted at for wasting people's time with stupid questions, writing awful code, not understanding licenses etc, but it was a pretty good entry point until I managed to get my hands on books for more modern languages.
AFAIK, my highschool still is offering BASIC in their intro CS curriculum. It's just so accessible and many of us preferred it over Python for intro classes
As a clueless, overly ambitious 12 year old I was a massive annoyance for the skilled users on their forums, I remember getting ranted at for wasting people's time with stupid questions, writing awful code, not understanding licenses etc, but it was a pretty good entry point until I managed to get my hands on books for more modern languages.