Visual C++ is actually very easy to get started with (it wasn't my first though) You run a wizard which generates a full, runnable, skeleton application into which you can then easily plugin code from a book (thank you David Kruglinski). I had done Win32 C programming (thank you Charles Petzold) prior to getting into Visual C++ and it was shocking to see how the IDE/Wizards really made complicated things extremely easy. In fact many of the noob programmers in my team didn't even know how to run the compiler, assembler, linker separately (they did not come from a Unix background) since the IDE did it all for you at the press of a function key.

Yeah, my view was Visual C++ was not so difficult to use; but that it was difficult to have access to. You had to have a computer that could run it, and then you had to be able to afford it. Am I shocked that some people had access to it? No. It is surprising that it would be someone's first access, though.

Actually it was the norm for Microsoft technology programmers (there was/is a huge number of them) and not surprising at all. You went from MS-DOS to Win16/Win32 to Visual C++ as MS kept releasing them, specifically the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit was a major checkpoint. IIRC the first version of VC++ was released on Windows NT 3.51 (or was it 4?) on a Intel 386 platform. The PC clones were available everywhere and in true hacker fashion people ran cracked copies of Windows NT and VC++ if they could not afford to buy it. For many programmers VC++/MFC was their first introduction to C++ language programming and i still remember trying to explain to noob programmers the distinction between MS' libraries/additions vs. plain vanilla C++ language.

That makes sense. It just barely post-dates my experiences.