I'm 32 and started with QBasic in DOS in 1994. After creating a program that reached 1000 lines of code (which I considered enormous at that time) I started to feel the limitations of the language. I then got a hold of a compiler for basic which sped things up a bit but went on to teach myself C. I was blown away by the improvement in speed! After the equivalent of "hello world", I created a minimal basic interpreter as my first C project which taught me a lot about the differences as well as a wide range of tasks in C that had little external dependencies (didn't have to deal with drivers or graphics). While the patterns I learned in BASIC weren't ideal, it was enough to give me the love of programming and and a lot to appreciate about the power of C. Then I got into web dev and was writing CGIs in C/C++ (even to the extent of generating jpeg charts from dynamic data). When I later discovered PHP I was ecstatic that I didn't have to recompile every time and db interfaces were so easy! It's all been a fun learning journey. I now also work with Rail and Node.js and embedded C/C++, and no, I no longer use SSI or CGIs, most definitely not in C!
