Screen mode 13h was definitely fantastic. Being able to light up a pixel by mapping directly to the 64k contiguous bytes in the address space was very intuitive.

And yeah dealing with Win32 stuff definitely came with its own set of complexities, I practically had the Charles Petzold Programming Windows book memorized back in the day.

But let’s also not forget Visual Basic, which outside of maybe Delphi, I'd consider one of the greatest RAD environments ever created. Being able to just grab a button onto a form and then double-click it which would instantly create a handler that you could add your logic to was very approachable even for younger audiences.

The only problem of course is that Visual Basic wasn’t bundled with Windows, so it was a lot less accessible than QBasic which came bundled for free with MS DOS 5.0.