My son asked if there was an easy language to pick up and do some foundational programming with. I thought QuickBasic at first, but then thought I should just show him VB. I downloaded Visual Basic Express 2008, but I am completely lost. Where is the object toolbar? Where is the form? Where is the property pane?
Instead it's Business Intelligence and Analysis Services. Where's the simply Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code?
It's there. You must have downloaded SQL Server Express, cause that is what gets installed.
Get the right stuff at http://www.microsoft.com/Express/VB/
I think that probably Visual Basic as it stands is not really the BASIC of our child hood. As with all things it has cast off the bindings of its parent and stands at the dawn of adulthood. Unfortunately with that, you've lost the ease of use and shallow learning curve. Such is life but anyway it is probably not the language you are looking for now.
In my own not so humble opinion, I think that for a suitably motivated youngster, it probably doesn't matter what language you start out with. With talent and infinite time, they will be able to endlessly amuse and edify themselves in ways that we might not, so maybe the search for a "beginners" programming language is unnecessary. My own child is not yet at the stage I can test that out yet, so probably I am completely wrong. Therefore I did a search in SO and came up with some interesting results:
Small Basic might be something to look into. It's not classic Basic, but it provides a good introductory environment to learn programming.
I know Java is a PITA and people dislike it for all sorts of reasons, but if you use the Beanshell interactive shell, you get the ability to learn Java sort of from scratch. You can pop up dialogs, add content, all interactively, and save it all back to disk for future use. I've been using it lately to debug new functionality in APIs I've never used before.
VB 2/3/4/6 is still available from MSDN subscriber downloads. So is QuickBasic 4.5 if you want to start with classic old basic.
That said, if you want to use modern tools why not get him started on C#? The 'getting started' hurdle for VB.NET and C# is roughly the same but after that there's a lot of benefit to using C#. But that's another story...
If you are set on using a dialect of Basic, there are many choices, some of which have already been mentioned by others. I'll throw in another: XBasic. (The link is a short Wikipedia article with further links for XBasic resources and downloads, as well as a chart at the bottom showing some other Basics as well.)
However, along the lines of 1800 INFORMATION's answer, I would suggest you not limit yourself to Basic. (I'm upvoting his answer because of the great resources he's collected on teaching programming to beginners.) My personal recommendation is Python. This is one of the easiest languages to learn, yet "scales up" extremely well to very advanced programming.
If I recall correctly, BASIC turned into Pascal while Pascal was busy turning into Delphi. It's quite shocking.
In some ways, learning to program has gotten harder. But in other ways it's gotten easier. Maybe the first few weeks seem intimidating, but after that you get to use all these nice libraries people have built.
I think the best way to learn the foundations of programming now is to play with a Python interpreter (you have your choice--CPython, IronPython, or Jython).
I just took a look at this set of comparisons between old VB and new. Holy crud.
I have two different languages I'd recommend your son learn instead of BASIC.
I've become a fan of How To Design Programs with scheme for introductory programmers. It doesn't have the baggage that comes with learning Java. The book is online, free, at htdp.org.
Another more traditionally imperative language to try might be Python. I don't, unfortunately, have a textbook I can wholeheartedly recommend. Perhaps somebody else does.
I suppose, though, you're possibly more interested in just having something to poke about it and maybe make a few neat flashy apps. I've been thinking about this in an "intro to CS" way more than a "high-tech macaroni and craft paper" sort of thing.