C hit it big in the 1980s as a language that was portable between smaller (PDP-11) and larger (VAX) minicomputers as well as microcomputers that had a 16-bit address space at best with memory management limited to switching a bank of ROM in and out.
I spent about $80 for a C compiler that run on the OS/9 operating system on my TRS-80 Color Computer. When I upgraded to a PC with MS-DOS there was a Microsoft C compiler that cost about $500, a Turbo C Compiler from Borland that costs around $100 and Tom Mix had a compiler that cost about $20. This was long before GCC.
C was astonishingly portable across machines of variable capabilities; I remember many Unix games like Nethack that would run on MS-DOS as well as they did on Sun workstations. Commercial C compilers supported a multiplicity of "modes" to work with the strange segmented architecture: for instance you could have a 64k address space for data and 64k code.
My favorite language of the late 1980s was Turbo Pascal which had extensions to support systems programming but was a better language than C in most respects and had OO extensions that were much easier to use than C++. I switched to C when I went to college though because I had access to Sun Workstations where C was the way to go.
GNU tools were already establishing themselves as the Cadillac of userspace (e.g. there wasn't commercial competition to make a better awk for HP/UX) but it was another three years before Linux came around and 32-bit x86 chips were starting to whup SPARC and PA-RISC on performance, never mind price-performance.
It was only about 1986 that AT&T was lifted the ban that prevented selling UNIX, which triggered the law suit against BSD a couple if years later.
The damage to other commercial OSes was already done by then.
I got to use Turbo C in 1992, after a couple of years with Turbo Basic and Turbo Pascal. Thankfully the teacher that brought us Turbo C, also had a copy of Turbo C++ 1.0 around.
So Xenix was the only UNIX where I was forced to use C, and a couple of university assignments a few years later.
Everywhere else, just following Bjarne's footsteps, I enjoyed C++ on UNIX, even with the quirks of catching up to C++ ARM.
C hit it big in the 1980s as a language that was portable between smaller (PDP-11) and larger (VAX) minicomputers as well as microcomputers that had a 16-bit address space at best with memory management limited to switching a bank of ROM in and out.
I spent about $80 for a C compiler that run on the OS/9 operating system on my TRS-80 Color Computer. When I upgraded to a PC with MS-DOS there was a Microsoft C compiler that cost about $500, a Turbo C Compiler from Borland that costs around $100 and Tom Mix had a compiler that cost about $20. This was long before GCC.
C was astonishingly portable across machines of variable capabilities; I remember many Unix games like Nethack that would run on MS-DOS as well as they did on Sun workstations. Commercial C compilers supported a multiplicity of "modes" to work with the strange segmented architecture: for instance you could have a 64k address space for data and 64k code.
My favorite language of the late 1980s was Turbo Pascal which had extensions to support systems programming but was a better language than C in most respects and had OO extensions that were much easier to use than C++. I switched to C when I went to college though because I had access to Sun Workstations where C was the way to go.
GNU tools were already establishing themselves as the Cadillac of userspace (e.g. there wasn't commercial competition to make a better awk for HP/UX) but it was another three years before Linux came around and 32-bit x86 chips were starting to whup SPARC and PA-RISC on performance, never mind price-performance.